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CA Dangles $1M Bounty for Ingres Conversion Tools
An anonymous reader writes "Computer Associates, on the heels of their announcement that they were moving to the service and support model, hence open sourcing Ingres, is set to announce a $1 million bounty for Ingres conversion tools [the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]. The bounty announcement coincides with the official announcement of the downloadability of the new, open-source Ingres. An earlier Information Week article rues the passing of Jasmine, which was a great idea, and, although perhaps a few years [maybe a decade?] ahead of its time, still the sort of thing that people like me could sure benefit from. Hint, hint..."
I suppose some time ago it would have been ironic that corporations are pushing their products into open source, rather than fighting it... however, now with open source software (and the movement) reaching the critical mass, they can no longer fight the tide, and have decided to ride with it.
This still made me smile though:
"Linux has proved you can have a successful commercial business around open source," Barrenechea says. "The innovation model in high tech is no longer constrained to corporations, no longer constrained to universities, no longer constrained to venture capitalists, but now is open to a million developers strong who want to contribute."
(quote of Mark Barrenechea, senior VP of product development for CA. )
http://efil.blogspot.com/
To me, the most amazing thing about this story is that it's not really that big a deal. Sure, it merits the ./ front page, but it really isn't that earth shattering.
Five years ago, it would have been positively mind blowing! This just shows how far open source has come. And for those of us who have been hawking open source since the 90's, it's truly gratifying to read a story like this, say "Cool, another little win," and move on.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
If the current corporate adoption of OSS is what constitutes critical mass (ie a few marginal projects here and there), then continue to welcome our current microsoft overlords.
Critical mass and market share are two entirely different things. The fact that open source has only a small marketshare, as measured by the number of commercial applications, does not invalidate the idea that open source has "gone critical", ie. that its mindshare is now so big that it is "exploding" on the software scene.
The metaphor from atomics isn't all that bad. Free and open source software (minus the labels) have now been around for decades, yet it is only in the last several years that they have appeared on the commercial radar, first as inconsequential, and now as a dire threat. In the world inhabited by Microsoft and friends, this is a real explosion in the software world.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm a coder. I love coding. I've been doing it for years.
I also love free software and I don't see it as a threat to my livelihood. On the contrary, I think it will provide me with secure employment.
Why? Because free, OSS software is useless by itself.
JBoss is free. Tomcat is free. MySQL is free. But they are all worthless to my company until I write code that uses them. These little babies have been making me a good living for the last few years!
I think OSS will accelerate the movement from software engineering being considered a manufacturing process to being accepted as a service. And I welcome that move.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
how Ingres compares to MySQL, Posgresql, Oracle?