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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/
http://efil.blogspot.com/
if I write some Ingres-deletion tools?
Sig. No Sig.
[the idea being, obviously, to convert to Ingres, rather than away from it]
Otherwise, they'd call it Egress...
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."
I used to work with a guy who knew ingres; MIT's technology licensing office used it, and it ran on a dec alphaserver running..openVMS. He had guaranteed job security, pretty much.
Too bad the head of the TLO office was a real bitch, but at least never around- she was also some bigwig at a bio research "organization" (read, somebody's tax shelter).
Some fun stuff used to happen though- I sat next to the woman who handled royalty checks to the professors and stuff. One professor "lost" a +$100,000 check. After harassing the crap out of her(screaming, threats of legal action because she couldn't get a new check to him IMMEDIATELY) over the phone, he called back with his tail between his legs- the new tenant at his OLD APARTMENT found it tucked into a MAGAZINE on his coffee table.
She turned to me and said "if you had just gotten a check worth over $100,000, what would you do with it?" "Run my ass right down to the bank as fast as I could and cash it." "Exactly! Not, say, 'tuck into magazine and leave magazine on my coffee table and then forget about it and move apartments'". She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...
Please help metamoderate.
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?
[how Ingres compares to MySQL, Posgresql, Oracle?]
;)
So far, all I got is: The others aren't offering a million dollars for conversion tools.
Hope that helps!
Computer Associates will buy your company, chew on it until its got all the flavor, then spit you out. My company started a data warehouse with Platinum software (great a metadata and data movement), then Platinum was bought by these guys, and CA halted development. We had to sue them to get our project money back.
CA has been buying companies for years, and not necessarily in a good way for consumers.
"At No. 4, we have Computer Associates. The current federal investigation into accounting irregularities notwithstanding, the company's longtime practice of acquiring aging technologies, slashing new development, and attempting to milk the installed base for service and support is a bigger issue. Users are trapped, CA knows it, and it does its best to take advantage of the situation."
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.