Slashdot Mirror
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.
Cost is a big one. Also using some of the product generated via university and research supported by tax dollars is another. Why not use what they've paid for?
Trolling is a art,
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.
That's a damn good question. Wasn't it CA who bought the commercial arm of PGP too? Whatever happened to that?
Exactly.
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?
That's quite true. That was one of the better first posts in spite of the minor error.
If I had a suggestion to improve the discussions, it would be to come up with a better method for determing the order to display posts instead of chronological order of the parents.
How about coming up with a score for each parent based on it's mod points, the number of child posts and their mod points?
Even just displaying them in decreasing order of total moderator points of the parent and all the children would improve things enormously by moving the more interesting threads to the top with chronological order being preserved only in case of ties.
That would, I think, make the obvious race by some among us to have the first post on a topic rather meaningless. Instead, it would place a higher value on making posts that are more likely to lead to on-topic discussions.
We bought ArcServe and Inoculan from Cheyenne. Cheyenne was an awesome company that had very good tech support. Under CA, these two products were modified and became crap. CA didn't know what they were doing and layed off much of the original developers. Tech support became unavailable as you would have to wait on hold longer than you do if you try to call AT&T wireless right now. (Hours and hours.), and then became an additional revenue stream for CA - not part of the original purchase price as it was when we bought the product.
:)
Inoculan moved from a pay once revenue stream to a yearly subscription pay scheme. This product has been crap up until version 7.0 (on 7.1 now) which is finally a halfway decent product.
We moved to BackupExec, and had a party to destroy the Arcserve installation disks.
We had a third CA product which we also had problems with after CA bought it., but for the like of me I cannot recall the details at all. I am so happy
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.