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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..."
First it was the big Linux guys -- Red Hat, Mandrake, etc. They GAVE AWAY their best products for FREE.
Then Big Blue, good ol' IBM, does the unthinkable and embraces free software as well.
Then we had Sun Microsystems consider doing the same with their Solaris beast and their Java libraries.
Now even old-timers like Computer Associates are trying to get in on this model. Is this THE NEW WAVE OF THE FUTURE?
Do we just GIVE AWAY SOFTWARE like it's nothing and then talk up our support staff and technical documentation?
We LOVE CODING too much to do that, so personally we're gonna keep doin what we love and selling it. Helping people with our products has never been fun anyway!
If you liked my post,
I was very exited about this as I have extensive SQL Server knowledge as well as some Ingres experience. As it turns out however, I can't enter. The PDF with the terms and conditions contains this paragraph:
The contest is intended for presentation in the United States, Canada
(except Quebec Province), Mexico, India, China, United Kingdom,
Australia, and New Zealand. Do not proceed in this site if you are not a
resident of one of those countries.
(In the actual document, it's in all CAPS, but the lameness filter prevents me from posting it that way)
I live in South Africa. Oh well...
siener's youtube channel
Apache's 67.7% marketshare is marginal?
No but it's irrelevant. A couple of years ago when I was doing the web startup thing numbers like the one above were tracked very religiously. HOWEVER, like the saying goes, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics". One of the decisions that our incredibly insightful mgmt made was to not support Netscape as a web server, citing the Netcraft #'s that showed it had a very small percentage of the market, esp compared to Apache. Well guess what, what they didn't take into account was that when you're trying to sell enterprise products, it's quality, not quanity that counts. All those websites running Apache were for the most part ma and pa/joe nerd websites. Pretty much everyone running Netscape was a Fortune 500 company. Gee, guess who's gonna spend >$10K for an enterprise web solution, the 1000 guys who downloaded Apache to run their blogs and Natalie Portman tribute sites, or Bank of America?
PITR: check. Postgres 8.0 now has it.
Tablespaces: check. Postgres 8.0 now has it.
Flexible, Coherent backups: check. Postgres 8.0 does this via PITR.
Runs on VMS. Generally irrelevant considering VMS is no longer manufactured. Any other platforms Ingres runs that Postgres doesn't? On the other hand, there are people that already port Postgres to PDA/Zaurus/etc.
I haven't done any reading regarding Ingres' other features, but it will be interesting to see whether Ingres has [the alternative of] stuffs like BYTEA/TEXT ("inline" blobs), PL's in many languages (Perl, C, Ruby, Python, Tcl, Java, Mono C#, PHP, PL/PGSQL), MVCC, partial index (index on only some rows of a table), regex, nested transaction/savepoint, full text search, object relational features (like table inheritance), and a bunch of convenient data types like arrays, geometry types, IPv4/IPv6, arbitrary precision numbers, etc.