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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.
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?
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 >
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,
. . . 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
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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.
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
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
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
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.
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/
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
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?
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'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.