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Ask Sam Greenblatt About CA's $1 Million Open Source Prize
Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.
What specifically about Open Source is so attractive to governments? It can't be just cost that makes Open Source so awesome. What is it?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Dear Mr. Greenblatt,
I'd be interested in discussing licensing and naming of your database; GNU/Ingres3 has a nice ring to it, yes? You can contact me through any of the YMCA shelters in California.
Regards,
RMS
How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?
Does the submission need to be open source? If so which licenses are acceptable? If not do you require the source code to review?
Is the Open Source Initiative seen internally as a way to address the problem that killed (or maimed) top programs like Quattro Pro, AccPac, and ArcServe?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open source lisence?
yes >
. . . release all of their back catalogue software as open source, especially if said software is no longer selling on the market?
Most big open-source projects (apache, linux, etc.) started out as open-source and have had a million eyes on them from the beginning. Ingres, on the other hand, is just getting all those eyeballs now after it is already a very mature product.
Have there been any difficulties relating to moving a mature closed-source project to an open-source model? Any caveats or lessons learned for others who want to make a similar migration?
All's true that is mistrusted
Given CA's current financial problems , do you guys actually have "1 million dollars" ::dr evil smirk::
ps. ill bet CA's one million dollars ill get modded as a troll for this
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-).
Trying the Survivor All Stars trick, it worked on TV.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
What is the fine print?
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Has your computer even been 0wn3ed? What do you plan to protect Linux-based customers from the threat of cackers as the population of Linux based business systems grows and becomes more attractive to mischeif makers?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can I have my million dollars now Regis?
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
1. cost
2. national security. there is no fscking warranty that the NSA does not have a Win backdoor *and* the latest Iraq thing showed that to have Yank troops in your door you don't really have to have wmds and stuff
3. security. meaning backdoors, viruses, trojans, you name it
4. another aspect of cost: development (of new -- needed -- features etc) can be done IN-country, as opposed to in Redmond
5. no vendor lock-in
6. no format lock-in
7. yeat another aspect of cost: even if money exchange hands, it normally stays in the country
8. quality. Free Software is on par with -- and many times better than -- proprietary software nowadays, so there is no _need_ of proprietary software anymore
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
How much of a savings do you anticipate receiving by basically outsourcing this work, as opposed to creating migration tools in-house? I would assume that this is a major reason for CA's decision
Come on guys, this was a funny joke that sleepnmojo said. I laughed my ass off, now how about having a sense of humour for chrissakes.
Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?
To the best of my knowledge large contractors like CA conduct themselves thusly:
Making the Sale: Bring in their best people to impress the suits
Crash Team: Bring in a few hotshots to write up the plan, direct some headcount and do some user training
Ongoing: All the people who really know anything leave for the next sale/crash-team and a pile of green people are left to maintain the contract. The greenies are paid so poorly they leave as soon as they've got some experience to make a living wage at some small site a big contractor wouldn't consider (or err terribly and go someplace the big contract comes in and displaces them in a few years.) People at the customer sight may know more than the greenies and find it frustrating having to actually train them customer service calls will consist of insufferable time-wasting telephone menu systems or websites where you wait several hours for an answer, or never get an answer, while your operation sits and burning cash while everyone hangs around the water cooler waiting for things to get going again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How do you respond to claims that Ingress is dying?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
What, would you say, sets Ingres apart from existing (more or less) Open Source Database products like PostgreSQL and MySQL?
In other words, why should I, as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?
"I Just Want You To Hurt Like I Do" - Randy Newman
How long has the Linux Technology Group existed at CA, and what has it accomplished thus far?
are you a catcher or a pitcher? ;-*
Do you genuinely believe in the open source movement?
If you do, why?
Do you see it as a source of revenue, something that will benefit humanity or a mixture of both...or neither?
Waaay back when there was this company called SGI, and they had this web based 3d plugin called cosmoplayer, later on cosmo became a whole division at SGI. Sporting amazing editors for developing 3d on the web as well as the plugin for displaying.
You may remember the '2nd web' campaign they had
ANYWAYS
Admist the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, admist promises & rumours of releasing this software open source. Alas nothing ever came to pass and that left more than a few embittered web3D developers.
So i ask....{in two parts}
What has ever become of this aquisition and what , if anything will ever happen with cosmo?
back in the day we didnt have no old school
I've only really played with SQL Server 7, Oracle 8i, MySQL and Postgresql.
How does Ingres stack up against MySQL/Postgres/Firefox/Oracle/et al?
I've come to like Postgres a lot, and am eagerly waiting for 8.0 final + one or two bugfix releases. Is Ingres worth a look?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Right Here
Mod parent down. Poster is a moron who couldn't be bothered to look for it.
Was OpenIngress (now even more so) chosen for being made free software, because it did not generate enough profit? Or alternatively, do you hope to rip benefits out of open-sourcing it (please enumerate), but otherwise could continue developing the product as proprietary?
Good luck, and I hope that open-sourcing Ingress will benefit both Computer Associates and the open-source community.
We have two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. http://www.shlomifish.org/
With all the federal concern on terrorism, what protections are in place or proposed to safeguard the development efforts against digital attack?
How do you intend to compete with Postgres and MySQL? If I search for "Postgres" and "Postgresql" on freshmeat.net, I turn up about 400 hits, and for "MySQL" about 1200 hits -- "Ingres" turns up merely 4 hits. That's an awful lot of established projects using the Big Two open source databases. These two have been in place for a while now, and has attracted a tremendous amount of development interest -- and developers generally hack on what they actually use. There is a lot of existing Postgres/MySQL experience in place. How do you intend to bridge this gap? Or do you intend to do so -- is that a goal of interest?
May we never see th
Can you give us some idea of the pricing on the support packages, or will these be negotiated on a case-by-case basis?
May we never see th
Would you summarize the points on which your license differs frommajor OSS licenses, such as the BSD license and the GPL? With respect to patents, just to clarify the license: if I choose to take a chunk of source code from Ingres, modify it, and incorporate it into another open source project, does the license you are using provide me with assurance that I am not infringing upon patents, as the GPL does?
May we never see th
Would CA go for developing an Smalltalk-like IDE but for more than just Ingres?
You would be able to manipulate objects, their functionality, and object relationships, in a single environment for multiple SQL data bases.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
As if it wasn't confusing enough having CA (USPS code for California) and CA (ISO Country Code for Canada). Now I have to consider CA (Abbreviation for Computer Associates) as a possibility when reading headlines.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Totally bogus profit grab. Definitely a bone to pick in the future, when contract renewal time comes up. ("remember when you fined us $1 million? Well we certainly do, so if you want in on the bidding process you might consider dropping your bid by, say, $1 million to be seriously considered as a candidate.")
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think CA's Open Source activities are great, but what is CA doing with Open Source inside of the company? Other than web servers, what's going on? Are CA's employees being encouraged (allowed) to use linux desktops on internal systems? Are alternatives to exchange/outlook/IE being explored? Surely the current round of worms and exploits must be affecting CA as much as it's affecting CA's customers.
Visual DBA Suite
Spatial Object Library
B1 Security
OpenROAD
Enterprise Access
EDBC
Will these be freely available (but not open), also what process did you go through when deciding what to contribute and what not to? I can imagine that these are areas where you feel you offer more than compeeting Open Source solutions and so you are holding back for now.
This is a shame, especialy with regards the Spatial library as PostgreSQL (via PostGIS) and MySQL (4.1 onwards) already have support for spatial objects and indexing.
Spell checker (c) creative spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
use IBM's TSM
I worked for ASK/Ingres when it was acquired by CA. It was a pretty ugly time but in the end I stayed on at CA for a couple of years afterwards. During that time, it became clear that CA's strategy was to:
1. sell Ingres to all their existing customers
2. sell their other products to the Ingres customers
3. Buy another company and goto 1.
So, I suspect that the reason for this announcement is that CA is struggling to sell Ingres in the face of Oracle's market dominance and CA's poor image as a supplier; and CA is looking for ways to extract more value from the product.
As I see it, in this case, the value is probably twofold:
(a) get some good PR and hopefully make a few friends
(b) assign some of those expensive DB engineers to something more profitable
Is this a reasonable assessment of the situation and if not, what future does CA see for the Ingres database?
Why is the offer limited to US companies? Does it have anything to do with software patents?
... and release the code for Clippy. :o)
I noticed that there is a list of new functionality going into the new version of Ingres.
Are you expecting a significant amount of new functionality to be integrated into Ingres because of the open-source effort, or are you expecting the open-source developers to focus more on tightening security, fixing bugs, and optimizing code?
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
I can answer a couple of these (unofficially, mind you; I'm just a peon).
CA licensed spatial objects from a third party and doesn't have the right to open source that feature without their permission.
The visual stuff depends on a third party tool for porting and I imagine that there were issues there that could not be resolved in the desired timeframe.
1 - What is the main reason for CA moving to the Open Source model ? And how could this new model affect current CA's business model (i.e., expecting more revenue from professional services/consulting instead from product licenses) ? 2 - Does CA seek for moving other products to the Open Source model too ? 3 - From your perspective, what is your expectation for the future of the Open Source development model ? Thanks,
I was reading the fine print of the rules. Is there a reason that residents of Ireland can't compete? I WANT a million bucks!!!
Please comment on the prospects for the convergence of Plone/CMF/Zope as the application server/framework for Ingres.
I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's short comings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).
What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
Is CA looking to lure users of open-source databases or closed-source databases to Ingres? There seems to be a fair amount of open-source activity with regard to tools for, say, both MySQL and Oracle. Which group is more sought after by CA? And does CA see the migration group being the same people who would want to migrate?
VDBA will be a free (but not open) download. Open Source replacements are being sought for Spatial Objects.
CA you F*cking guys you killed Clipper! Bastards!
One of the middleware products CA has in its catalogue is "Intelligent Warehouse". IW was originally created by HP for internal use, then it was marketed by Platinum which was acquired by CA. CA supported IW (version 3.4.5) until May 2003, but some companies are still using it despite not having support. It is an excellent product, so I would like to ask Mr. Greenblatt to consider open sourcing this program too.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Hi, being someone who has re-read Levy's "Hackers" a couple times and is a fan of Unix history, couldn't help but notice your last name. Are you, in fact, related to Richard (Ricky) Greenblatt of MIT, "Hackers", TMRC, TX-0, Kluge Room, PDP-1, Spacewar fame? I did check your CA bio, which didn't hint of any such thing. I don't remember if he ever had a family.
I like the Blatt-isms, such as "If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born."
Just curious, Lincoln
Why now? Open source isn't a new concept by any means. There have been great open source solutions out there for some time. My question is why do you have the desire to make the change now (as opposed to before) and what, if anything, has played a role in your decision to hold off?
the reason that open source is so nice is that you don't have to wait for the vendor to fix it if there is a bug found. You can fix it yourself.
When I was in industry we always wanted source code
with the systems we installed. You never Knew when they might go out of business
"best backup software" They take the brand recognition of ArcServe and rename it to something obscure. Have you tried to do a restore using a search? I had to help restore a file from several weeks in the past. It uses a Dumb-ass Windows 3.1 style modal dialog box, you cant minimize it and you cant go anywhere else in the application, so you have to cancel the search window in order to get to the device or job views and theb re-execute the search. You cant print the search results, cant copy the results to the clipboard, cant search within the results, cant search with a partial path (only searches file names). Its quite evident no one in QA or development has tried to do this in a real world environment. I drove me to distraction and probably octupled the time it should have taken to locate the proper version of the file in the catalog. The disk to disk does not work like a tape backup, instead of rolling to the next scratch disk drive when out of space on the current drive it stops, making it useless to take advantage of D2D speed during the evening backup window and transfer to tape during the day or swap the drives for the next evening. The last I heard as of 6 weeks or so ago Exchange document level backup was still not functional. I am only slightly hopeful that they might get these resolved in the next 12 months. How about it CA?