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Ask Sam Greenblatt About CA's $1 Million Open Source Prize

Posted by Roblimo on from the trying-to-win-open-source-hearts-and-minds dept.

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.

28 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. What is it? by mfh · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:What is it? by einhverfr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      How does Ingres r3 compair to PostgreSQL? I would suggest that as PostgreSQL has really surged ahead re: user friendliness and power, that Ingress is probably behind and they want hte communuty to make it better :-)

      Remember that PostgreSQL and IngreS have a common heritage over a decade ago.

      --

      LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
  2. Impact on revenue by pen · · Score: 3, Interesting
    How are you expecting this decision to impact your revenue? Are you hoping for more support revenue to make up for licensing revenue?

    How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?

    1. Re:Impact on revenue by pen · · Score: 2, Interesting

      While the questions are obvious, the answers are not. Obviously, I'm expecting a more detailed answer than "Yes" or "No" -- what lead them to make the decision and what they're counting on to provide new revenue.

  3. Only open source submissions? by sammyo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does the submission need to be open source? If so which licenses are acceptable? If not do you require the source code to review?

  4. CA's history by nightsweat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    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
  5. Other open products by opqdonut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open source lisence?

    --
    yes > /dev/dsp
  6. Why don't companies. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    . . . release all of their back catalogue software as open source, especially if said software is no longer selling on the market?

  7. Moving from closed to open source by Theatetus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  8. Burned bridge repair? by macemoneta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. How much less expensive is Open Source for CA? by Viperion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  10. Damage Control? by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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?

    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
    1. Re:Damage Control? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?

      Well, here's an example... Since I have no documentation, you will have to take this as hearsay, though I still have contact with a half dozen people that remember this.

      In the late 1980s (when large mainframe configurations cost many millions of dollars), we were setting up a new mainframe onto which we were going to migrate the existing user base of another mainframe. The old mainframe was running several CA products, so we installed the products on the new mainframe in preparation (as we did with all the vendor products).

      About two weeks later, we moved the users, and notified all our vendors that we had migrated from machine a to b, and to update our licenses for that machine (we had over a dozen mainframes at the time).

      CA assessed us approximately a $1M fine (by my recollection), for running their software on an unlicensed machine (the two weeks prior to the migration), even though there were no users on the machine. The only thing we did was insure it was properly installed, so there would be no outages during the cutover. After a few months, our lawyers rolled over, and I heard that CA got their money (possibly in extended contracts; I never heard the details).

      As you can imagine, our other vendors took the opportunity to market their more tolerant attitude and understanding in the process of mainframe installation, and we took them up on their offer as soon as possible, and wherever feasible.

      Does that answer the question?

  11. Unique Selling Points by thisfred · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  12. Linux Technology Group by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How long has the Linux Technology Group existed at CA, and what has it accomplished thus far?

  13. Cosmo? by drfrog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  14. How does Ingres stack up? by JBMcB · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  15. Reason for Open-Sourcing by Shlomi+Fish · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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/
  16. How do you intend to compete with Postgres? by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  17. Support pricing? by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  18. License details by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  19. Is the value of Ingres to CA now solely in PR? by smee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  20. What do you expect? by guitaristx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  21. Dear Mr. Greenblatt, by raulfragoso · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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,

  22. Why can't I compete??? by maccarthy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!!!

  23. Re:Spatial objects by jmacgill · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Humm, makes you wonder if they would be interested in Open Source replacements for some of the extentions in order to free themselves up a little from past agreements.

    --
    Spell checker (c) creative spelling inc. (aka my dyslexic brain)
  24. Wither Ingres? by Herbmaster · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Sam,

    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.
  25. Source audience for the migration by professorfalcon · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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?