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.

Comments

Please contact me

[Anonymous Coward]

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

CA's history

[nightsweat]

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?

Moving from closed to open source

[Theatetus]

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?

Fair Compensation

[Lord_Dweomer]

Do you feel that $1 million dollars is fair compensation for the developer when if you were to hire and develop "normally" it would cost many times that?

Re:What is it?

[einhverfr]

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.

How much less expensive is Open Source for CA?

[Viperion]

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

Unique Selling Points

[thisfred]

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?

Cosmo?

[drfrog]

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?

How does Ingres stack up?

[JBMcB]

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?

Reason for Open-Sourcing

[Shlomi Fish]

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.

Is the value of Ingres to CA now solely in PR?

[smee]

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?