CA's Greenblatt Answers re Ingres $1 Million Bounty and Other Matters

The idea of a Slashdot interview with Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group, grew out of the company's decision not only to release its Ingres r3 database under an open source license but also their offer of up to $1 million to developers who write migration tools for it. Today we present Greenblatt's answers. 1) CA's history -- by 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?

Greenblatt:
Computer Associates has always built products and used acquisitions to fill out the portfolio of solutions we bring to market. Open source should never be viewed as a mechanism to jettison products. We at Computer Associates believe that open sourcing a project is a way of making a product more available to more developers, and to make it more successful in the marketplace.

Regarding the products that you mentioned -
*CA never purchased Quattro Pro
*CA sold the subsidiary ACCPAC International to The Sage Group
in December 2003. The sale of ACCPAC culminated CA's multi-year effort to exit the business applications market and focus the company's strategy on management software.
*BrightStor ARCserve Backup is a strategic product in CA's BrightStor storage management solution portfolio and continues to be a strong revenue producer for CA.

2) Moving from closed to open source -- by 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?

Greenblatt:
Ingres started out as an open source project with a BSD license and moved to commercial software when Michael Stonebraker formed Ingres Corp.. Over the last 25 years, Ingres has grown in functionality and is now returning to its roots in the open source community. There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today - it will ultimately attract a multitude of contributors to the project. It is important that others looking to make a similar migration, build a community around the product before releasing it, similar to what CA has done with our work with the JBoss, Zope and the Plone Foundation.

3) Fair Compensation -- by 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?

Greenblatt:
The challenge is not intended to compensate for development efforts but to rather to seed the community with funds to enable members to work on the project without the constraints of financial hardship. There is no question that CA could have and would have built these tools but we decided to challenge the community to build these tools and to begin working with CA on open source projects around Ingres.

4) Burned bridge repair? -- by macemoneta
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?

Greenblatt:
CA has been systematically working to improve its relationships with customers. We have more than 600 non-commissioned sales people whose job it is to make sure that customers are satisfied We launched FlexSelect licensing to offer customers a better way to buy the software they need from us on their terms. These efforts are paying off - our customer satisfaction surveys continue to improve every year, and show dramatic increases over the past three or four years.

5) Unique Selling Points -- by 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?

Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

6) Cosmo? -- by 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

Amidst the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, amidst 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?

Greenblatt:
Actually, Cosmo was purchased from SGI by Platinum Technology in 1998. To the best of my knowledge, Platinum laid off most employees associated with Cosmo and talked about submitting Cosmo to open source. CA acquired Cosmo with the acquisition of Platinum in May 1999. Soon after the acquisition, CA made Cosmo available on the web for free distribution, but never announced any plans for releasing the product into open source. Additional information on Cosmo can be found at http://www.ca.com/cosmo/.

7) Other open products -- by opqdonut
Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open license?

Greenblatt:
We will look to release other products into open source under the CA Trusted Open Source License where it makes sense.

8) Wither Ingres? -- by Herbmaster
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 shortcomings 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.

Greenblatt:
Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

9) Impact on revenue -- by pen
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?

Greenblatt:
CA will provide support for Ingres r3, including indemnification, as an added cost option. Software developers can incorporate Ingres into their own solutions as long as the Ingres source code is made available in accordance with the CA Trusted Open Source License (CATOSL).

10) Can you just give me the money? -- by anti-NAT
I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-) .

Greenblatt:
Is that my daughter??????

#####

Comments

Re:ask slashdot

[Zorilla]

I think it has to do with the idea of transferring large amounts of something between places- in this case, it's data.

Those aren't his answers.

[DAldredge]

Those aren't his answers, those are the answers of the CA PR depts.

Insights into the psychology of compulsive lying?

[Frater 219]

Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

M. Greenblatt appears to be unable to discuss any actual advantages of the Ingres database software. Instead, he resorts to smears like this one against existing open-source competitors to his product. Naturally, since he is answering a question about existing enterprise open-source database systems, to deny that they exist is nothing more than lying.

Moreover, it's a lie that simply will not be believed in this forum, where the audience is already much more familiar and comfortable with these competitors than with Ingres. So why bother lying? When a person lies even when they know that they will not be believed, it suggests that there is something seriously the matter with them.

Kinda boring..

[lukewarmfusion]

No offense to Slashdot editors or the folks that asked questions, but the interview seemed very bland to me. He sounds like any PR man - avoiding tough issues and criticism while spinning everything to sound like it's a good thing (TM).

I liked the point about CA being a graveyard for good products. I didn't realize that other people saw it like that... My perception of CA is that it's a lumbering giant among cutting edge powerhouses. By the time they get around to doing something like this [releasing Ingres as Open Source] they're too late. With so many open source database solutions out there, I doubt they'll offer anything special enough to really compete. So it turns into another candidate for their graveyard.

Re:Kinda boring..

[justins]

I liked the point about CA being a graveyard for good products.

Did you like the part about it being a bullshit question with false premises?

He sounds like any PR man - avoiding tough issues and criticism while spinning everything to sound like it's a good thing (TM).

The quality of the questions pretty much made the interview unsalvageable. The poor guy did as well as he could IMO.

Doublespeak and marketing blather.

[Shayde]

I had to laugh out loud listening to this stuffed shirt 'answer' the questions. I give you this particular gem regarding why an opensource developer should choose Ingres over MySQL or PostgreSQL:

Greenblatt:
This question is like comparing the three divergent products in asking which one should one use. We understand that there are different reasons for selecting each product. It is incumbent upon you the end user or developer to look for the one that best meets the needs of their application. There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

At first, Greenblatt says "Well, it depends on what you want you can't just compare them and say one is best". Then , in the next breath, "there will be no doubt ... making Ingres the best choice" - but at no point does he actually answer the question. Why is Ingres better than PostgresSQL or MySQL, two well proven, widely accepted, and powerful database solutions? I still see absolutely no reason to support Ingres, nor do anything to support CA's policy of embrace and devour.

This is just a bone thrown to the opensource community. I predict, knowing the wisdom and capreciousnes of the opensource world, that Ingres will simply vanish, as MySQL and PostgresSQL continue their growth into enterprise-level applications

Re:Doublespeak and marketing blather.

[Anonymous Coward]

as MySQL ... continue their growth into enterprise-level applications

HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!!11

Fair Compensation

[artemis67]

I think the bigger problem of offering $1 million to the developer community, when the cost of development may be much more than that, will be if there are competing projects but only one winner. Somebody will have to eat the cost of that development time. Shrewd for CA, perhaps, but very risky for everyone else.

Re:Fair Compensation

[erick99]

A million dollars sounds dirt cheap if they end up with all of these migration tools. I think it's disingenuous of of CA to talk about "seed money" when they are really taking advantage of what will end up to be minimum wage payments after all of the development hours are accounted for. But, nobody is being forced to do it either. If politics makes for "strange bedfellows" then a few dollars sprinkled among hungry developers must make for an even stranger sight.

Cheers,

Erick

Re:Fair Compensation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the bigger problem of offering $1 million to the developer community, when the cost of development may be much more than that, will be if there are competing projects but only one winner. Somebody will have to eat the cost of that development time. Shrewd for CA, perhaps, but very risky for everyone else.

Welcome to Open Source. If you left your job to go do F/OSS full time, you'd be doing the exact same thing as this anyway. There's NO guarantee that you'll make even a single penny off your work, regardless of how good it is. Since you give the source code away, you can't expect to get any money in support or through sales of either product or licensing. Anyone else can pick up your source, learn it, and charge less than you for support of it and get all of your support business.

Re:Fair Compensation

[GoofyBoy]

>Somebody will have to eat the cost of that development time.

And how is this different from any other OpenSource project?

The $1million is a bonus.

Re:Fair Compensation

[Nightshade]

I think the real genius of offering this money is that now CA gets a whole bunch of developers to probably download and play around with ingres. I know that I definitely wouldn't have spent 2 minutes looking at this product otherwise since there are already 2 great solutions out there. But somehow offering $1million made me at least toy with the thought of trying to compete and trying to learn the ingres platform. I think $1 million is pretty cheap for CA to bring their DB back to the forefront of what developers consider when they think about which tools they should be using. So in my mind this money is just advertising money that has the side effect of possibly producing some nice ideas that CA can piggyback off of.

Don't get me wrong though -- I'm not complaining about them doing this. I actually think it's a great strategy.

Re:bah

[winkydink]

What were you expecting from a senior executive at a publicly traded company? Forward-looking revenue projections? 4-letter words?

Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[aralin]

He is totally avoiding both questions about comparison with postgres and why should anyone even care anymore about their database when postgres is more advanced already. He didn't put out a single reason or a feature that would attract people from postgres to them.

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just check out Ingres's feature points. It has a parallelizing query optimizer -- postgresql still cannot do that. I don't even think postgresql can do partitioning. Postgresql is a great database, but when it gets to a certain size, there's real growing pains (not half as bad as mysql's, but still)

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

He is totally avoiding both questions about comparison with postgres and why should anyone even care anymore about their database when postgres is more advanced already. He didn't put out a single reason or a feature that would attract people from postgres to them.

That's what marketing people and managment are really good at - talking a whole lot but actually saying nothing at all. He wrote over 100 words in response to the postgres/mysql comparison questions, but didn't say a single meaningful thing. Are there classes in business school that teach this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[kschendel]

And what exactly makes you think that postgresql (*NOT* postgres, clown, which is something different) is more advanced than Ingres? Postgresql has some interesting features, like MVCC. Ingres has a bunch of features that Postgresql doesn't, like parallel query, partitioned tables, parallel sort, and so on.

If you want specific feature answers, why don't you try reading the respective manuals? Greenblatt's a Linux and Open Source strategist for CA, not an Ingres guru. Or, try asking your questions on the Ingres opensource forums at opensource.ca.com.

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[jedidiah]

Why should I when the CEO of the company that SOLD it can't even be bothered to do so in preparation for an interview with a highly technical audience?

It's not like he was expecting to be interviewed by some dimwit from Forbes.

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[Cragen]

I think they are born this way. The /. community, when we were all children and got caught eating the last cookie Mom made/bought, when asked "WHY would we do such a thing?", couldn't think of anything more than "Well, duh, it was just there." These guys not only had a good excuse bubble right out of them just on *instinct* that either got them a second helping or, just as often, got one of US into trouble. I hates them to pieces, I does. They are worse to deal with than women! Apologies to the fairer half, but, at least, with women, our hearts get to go pitter-patter for a little bit before we get squashed like a bug in a rug. /sniff/

Cragen

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[einhverfr]

If you want specific feature answers, why don't you try reading the respective manuals? Greenblatt's a Linux and Open Source strategist for CA, not an Ingres guru. Or, try asking your questions on the Ingres opensource forums at opensource.ca.com.

Here is the problem. I wasn't expecting an Ingres guru. I was interested in hearing what he had to say about the open source strategy of pushing Ingres out into the open source world (pun intended). In the end I was disappointed because I didn't hear anything meaningful. As an open source strategist, I would *hope* that he would at least have an understanding of the competitive issues that Ingres will face and why it is likely to be successful. Instead we hear nothing meaningful.

I don't think anyone here expects him to say "Ingres's parallelizing query optimizer is structured such that x, y, and z types of queries are much faster on Ingres than on MySQL" but it would be helpful to hear something about clustering, or any of these other features. Otherwise, I am *still* of the opinion that for its large-scale features, PostgreSQL is still far more featurful than Ingres. And it has a faster pace of development too meaning it will likely be a better long-term bet.

Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question

[darnok]

> Are there classes in business school that teach
> this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed
> Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?

I've just come out of a meeting where the published agenda was "this is a critical initiative that requires contributions from all stakeholders to ensure that our department is able to work together effectively and efficiently, while delivering the quality that our customers expect".

That's the least useful description I've ever seen that didn't involve the phrase "paradigm shift".

Yes, it was a management meeting. No minutes taken, no decisions made, no action items taken by anyone, no ownership of any issues. On the other hand, given I had to be at work for that period of time anyway, it was a convenient opportunity for me to site quietly in the corner in a semi-comatose state for 90 minutes.

He's not lying

[jbellis]

he's a CEO, not the lead Ingres developer.

Honestly it's /.'s fault for modding up questions that aren't appropriate for the interview subject.

Re:He's not lying

[kfg]

He is, as the first sentence of the blurb states, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group.

A manager, but a technical manager. That's why the questions were submitted to him instead of acting CEO Ken Cron. To maybe get some answers to questions from technologists from the technologist point of view.

We could have just read the CA website on our own if all we wanted was the standard promotional dreck.

KFG

Re:He's not lying

[Anonymous Coward]

A CEO that can't list things that make his company's product better than the competition? Give me a break! If he was really that stuck for an answer, he should have asked the lead developers.

Re:He's not lying

[jedidiah]

He is in effect, the lead SALESMAN. As a lead SALESMAN, he should be able to at least offer one or two reasons why to use his product rather than something that you could get for free.

I doubt that Ellison or Gates would have such difficulties.

This only requires some understanding of the likely needs of his customers. It's really not that technical.

Re:He's not lying

[mefus]

Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group

I think you are still on a completely different layer of the protocol stack from application architecture.

Re:He's not lying

[kfg]

Yes, I am at the top layer of the technology protocol stack. The layer at which it would be inappropriate to ask questions about specific implimentations of specific algorithms, but at which genreralized technical questions are most appropriately addressed if you aren't just after the "information" you can find in a sales brouchure.

And, quite frankly, his answers were subpar even for a sales brouchure.

I'll give him this though, the questions themselves were, for the most part, also subpar.

KFG

Re:He's not lying

[0racle]

Now that I'd like to see. Lets have an Ask Slashdot for Larry with the question, "Why should I choose Oracle over PostgreSQL?" Not that I think that he has no idea about his own product, but that he knows little about all the competing ones. Without knowing that, there would be no way of giving any reasons to choose one over the other, which is probably the same reason there were no real reasons to choose Ingres over something else.

Re:He's not lying

[mefus]

Yes, I am at the top layer of the technology protocol stack.

Then you are in a different layer (and it's not the top in the metaphorical sense I think I clearly implied.)

He's answering questions as to why CA chose to open Ingres, and why they chose to allocate $1M to pay contributors.

Re:He's not lying

[jedidiah]

He could merely limit himself to the high end and have more than ample ammunition against postgres. He could also simply assume that postgres is as good as sqlserver or db2 and still have plenty to work with.

Larry has room to "cheat" in this respect.

He could also have a subordinate do the appropriate research before handing himself to the wolves. One would hope that a CEO would do as much.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[ahsile]

Hey... why should that stop me from trying to write a converter? I wouldn't mind a piece of that $1m, and I've written converters before. I'm sure it will suit a niche market...

Ingres R3 benefits unclear

[augustz]

As probably many other folks did when they heard about Ingres going open source, they wondered, "what exactly can Ingres do?". After all, code talk and talk walks.

That's why I was a bit sad to see that we didn't get a clearer articulation of the ingres feature / benefit list, other then "There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today".

Not only does this assume that all workloads are created equal, but in the land of marketspeak, a fair number of folks have enjoyed getting a bit more detail beyond slogans like "best" and "most functional".

What I would love is some first hand reports from folks who've used Ingres. Reading their documentation (which looks pretty complete) they have a bunch of nice features.

Native multi-master replication?
Blistering performance on a cross platform architecture?

Fill us in...

Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear

[Christopher B. Brown]

Seeing as he had time to prepare, the paucity of articulation of concrete benefits of Ingres suggests that there's no story to tell.

I have long heard stories about the query optimizer being better than anything else out there; if there's only faint truth, it's still worth mentioning.

He certainly had a chance to mention any features he wanted to point out. That's a marketer's job, isn't it?

In the absence of that, and considering that there sure appear to be some, this suggests to me that Ingres has gone "to the place where software goes to die."

Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear

[10scjed]

...What I would love is some first hand reports from folks who've used Ingres...

nobody has been able to ever since CA grabbed it up and jammed their stupid licensing runtime on it. the best thing they could have done is open source the thing- now that it will run uninterrupted for a while we may be able to see what it can do.

for the unitiated, CA has a license file system that is somewhat based on the FLEX system, except it doesnt work (and therefore neither do the products).

Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear

[msobkow]

I'm not sure about the current releases, but back around 6.3-6.4, Ingres had more features, tunability, and advanced concepts than Oracle, Sybase, or DB/2. It really was a nice database, and the people with their offices in California were pretty sharp.

The problem is that I can't imagine it having grown all that much since then. Once it got taken over by CA, it became a feature for supporting their business, which means it didn't get the focus on enhancements and capability growth that it might have otherwise.

That's really the big problem with anything CA buys. They use it to build their business and service their customers, but they stop doing much (if any) new feature development on the tools they've bought out.

Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear

[msobkow]

Maybe I'm phrasing things a bit harshly. Most of the products CA supports and maintains would be abandonware if CA weren't willing to contract the support for business customers who need those products. Just because a product's market wasn't big enough to maintain long-term company viability doesn't mean the product was useless to the market share it did win.

I'll have to look into whether Ingres has full XA support and a cross-platform POSIX support base, but if it runs anywhere SuSE and RedHat do, as well as the commercial *nix vendors, then it could be a viable application database.

The catch is ensuring that customers using that database are providing CA enough of a support and maintenance revenue stream to ensure that OSS Ingres is kept current. With the commercial vendors, it's clear that they have the revenue stream needed to fund the maintenance and support of a core business service. With OSS, you need to make sure the product has the support you need to leverage it in your business infrastructure.

Theoretically if OSS Ingres has support contracts from CA, and PostgreSQL has support contracts from RedHat, then it's up to industry to decide whether those are viable, reliable, secure providers for running their business.

Even Windows is viable to many businesses who trade off available skillsets, price, availability, reliability, uptime, scalability, etc. Every business has different needs, so it's up to them to decide which providers have the best fit and service options to handle their requirements.

At issue are the "leech" customers who think everything should be free as in beer. That needs to be discouraged, maybe by something so simple as making it the responsibility of business to identify who is handling the service and support of their infrastructure. Most likely that's something that affects business insurance pricing and availability rather than being a real threat to the viability of product support services.

No one has ever said that OSS has no cost -- it's just a means of providing the end-customer assurances about the long-term viability of a solution (they have the source), the maintenance of the solution (everyone can vet the code for security gaps), and of allowing different organizations in different areas to provide regionalized support for their local business culture.

Re:ask slashdot

[stratjakt]

That's stupid, databases are about storage and orginization, not transportation.

Re:ask slashdot

[Zorilla]

I guess I should rephrase that. It's more about the handling of large amounts of data.

What!?

[joshsnow]

Why is Ingres better than PostgresSQL or MySQL, two well proven, widely accepted, and powerful database solutions?
With respect, your paraphrase of the question is a little clueless - unless yor're playing devils advocate. Ten years ago, Ingres was one of the Big Four database management systems. The order was; Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase. Ingres was owned by a Uk company, Ask Group, who hit financial difficulty just when Ingres was really taking off in a big way. The fire sale to CA quickly reveresed that trend, I suppose because of CAs reputation.

Ingres had , at the time , the rich feature set that Oracle, Sybase and Informix still have - stored procedures, tablespaces, rules and procedures, server clustering, multi-phase commit over several distributed server sites, out of the box failover facilities, a 4gl based forms environment etc etc.

MySQL and PostGres may be moving towards gaining these kind of enterprise grade facilities but, as far as I know, they're not there yet. They are undoubtedly widely accepted for the kinds of small to medium size developments - usually web projects, and they are both powerful enough for those types of projects. However, Ingres is far more on the Oracle kind of scale.

If I'm correct, I think PostGres may be a continuation of the original BSD licenced Ingres (hence POSTgres) I still see absolutely no reason to support Ingres,

Depends on exactly what CA are releasing into the wild.

nor do anything to support CA's policy of embrace and devour.

Agreed. Which is why, ten years down the line, Ingres is being hung out to dry.

Re:What!?

[chris_mahan]

So then we can look at ingres's best enterprise features, and implement them in postgresql.
No? Oh, then we'de better not even look at the ingres code, otherwise they'll say we stole the stuff.

<joke>
1 patent lawyer thrown in the ocean: pollution.
1000 patent lawyers thrown in the ocean: solution.
</joke>

dodged my question

[Lord_Dweomer]

Well, as excited as I am that my question was third, he managed to dodge it quite well.

"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?

Greenblatt:
The challenge is not intended to compensate for development efforts but to rather to seed the community with funds to enable members to work on the project without the constraints of financial hardship."

So in other words, they're getting development done on the cheap. Which was the entire point of why I asked that question. Its kind of like when Slashdot had that contest for the tshirt design, and the prizes were really craptacular when you consider how much money Slashdot saved on hiring a graphic designer and how much money they'll make selling your product.

Unfortunately, 1 million is more than enough to lure in people.

Re:dodged my question

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, they're getting development done on the cheap.

Welcome to the world of F/OSS. Nowhere in the GPL does it entitle anyone to any money.

Re:dodged my question

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't really compare Slashdot with CA. Slashdot already operates in the red and simply asking for donations.

Though I agree that he completely dogdged your question. CA offers no reasons over why one should choose Ingres over Postgres and the community should reject the product and stick with building Postgres into a enterprise level database engine.

Re:dodged my question

[danila]

I think this question was actually among those answered quite well. I'll try to clarify his response.

He means that the $1 million is not meant to just buy the code, probably because Open Source is different from traditional commercial contracted development. It's meant to provide the stimulus sufficient for the OSS development model. There are already enough people willing to work on database code, the prizes are to provide additional motivation and compensate the best developers. Just like Ansari promised to pay $10 million to the X Prize winner. It's irrelevant that "normally" it would (and it does) cost billions to send a ship up high. Your indignation over CA getting something "on the cheap" is completely unfounded.

Re:dodged my question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, motivation to create a converter programs to steal customers away from other database projects, which they will translate into "We'll give you a free database server.....we even have converter programs to convert from your old database server....plus we offer support which you can buy for $XXXX.XX dollars....hehehehehe"

Re:dodged my question

[Lord_Dweomer]

I don't think my indignation was unfounded at all.

They are making a product, which would normally cost a LOT more, which would normally require them to pay a LOT more people, and are instead giving one person a fraction of that (but still considerable for the individual) as a prize. I'm sorry, but when it comes to one person being rich, versus having many more tech people employed (which we should all be hoping for), I'm going with the latter.

Re:dodged my question

[danila]

More tech people employed? I guess if you take back your complaints about "one person being rich", Microsoft PR department might want to buy the rights to your comment to use in their FUD attacks agains Open Source. :)

Some people are willing to work for free on OSS projects. Others are willing to exploit this in order to make a profit. There is nothing bad about it. RedHat (and other distro companies) are taking an OSS product and trying to make a buck from it. They aren't necessarily paying Linux programmers a LOT. CA is creating a new open product, contributing to the OSS world and they are contributing money too. They are not forcing anyone to work on it, they are not taking anything from anybody. They are just making an honest offer that some people might be willing to accept. What's wrong with that?

Re:dodged my question

[danila]

Yep. Steal customers away from competition. Just like Linux does with Windows (and other unices) and like Firebird does with IE.

What's wrong with that? It's not like they are forcing you (or anyone else) to buy their support contracts...

WTH

[KillaKen187]

The whole interview was arrogant. He is worse than Michael Flatley I can understand his loyality to his product, but give us some reasons. Convience, rather than belittle us The slashdot community is NOT gullible

Re:WTH

[Anonymous Coward]

The slashdot community is NOT gullible

Between this and someone equating MySQL with "enterprise-level" quality this has got to be one of the funniest threads ever.

Re:WTH

[PenguinBoyDave]

Belittle YOU? Excuse me...the Slashdot community did nothing but call him and CA names...PRIOR TO HIS RESPONSES, make unfounded accusations WITHOUT researching first, and honestly, you didn't even give him a chance. You were looking for a reason for him and CA to fail, and it irritates the hell out of me that you and the clear majority of this "community" are so frigging arrogant that you think MySQL can't use a little competition. Get a life people...you are making the community look really piss-poor.

Title Change

[InfiniteWisdom]

Might I suggest that the "answers" in the story title be changed to "responds"? He certainly has not answered any of the questions.

Perhaps even responds is too generous. How about "talks in PRspeak on subjects vaguely connected with the questions"?

Re:Title Change

[justins]

If you want serious answers, ask serious questions. The factual basis of many of those questions was obviously flawed. Some of them were just banal.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Re:Title Change

[PenguinBoyDave]

AMEN!

No Information Here

[Gyorg_Lavode]

There is no substantial information here. This is nothing more than an advertisement.

Some of these questions were answered

[kfg]

And answered better, in threads at the time of question submission. It seems odd that time and space should be wasted by submitting questions to Greenblatt that are, ummmmmm, "factually flawed" when their poor roots in reality were addressed at that time.

The one answer that draws my attention though is the claim that the big million isn't for compensation of development efforts, but to alleviate constraints of financial hardship.

Come again? It's a contest. First you do development, perhaps under conditions of great financial hardship, then, after you do the work, maybe you win something to pay off the credit card bills you lived off of while doing the work.

It's not only compensation after the fact, it's very improbable compensation after the fact.

Tell ya what guys, if you really want me to work on the project while alleviating any financial hardship on my part fund the project with the million. Or at least just send me a case of rice noodles.

As it is this contest appears not to be either compensation or "alleviation", but rather a splashy offer in order to grab a lot of free headline space.

You can make up your own Dr. Evil joke about trying to make their million stand out against IBM's commitment of a billion.

KFG

Re:Some of these questions were answered

[Ignignot]

It's not only compensation after the fact, it's very improbable compensation after the fact.

I believe they modeled their prize after the Nobel prize, which awards somewhere around 1M dollars. The whole point is not that people working in the field are hoping for the prize to cover their expenses, instead it is so that once someone is really good at what they do, and is willing to distribute their work for the good of humanity, they should be free of the constraints of money to continue their work after they recieve the prize. Not before.

I think that paying 1M for a single programmer is actually quite high, except that they are obviously going to stimulate growth in the ingres OSS community. I think this is a good plan, and one of the only ways to jump start the OSS juggernaught. The problem with OSS is that it has to be popular to have those "million eyes" on it, and this goes a long way towards making that happen.

Re:Some of these questions were answered

[kfg]

I did not denigrate their contest. In fact, in the annoucment story I rather supported the idea that people would participate in it just for the thrill of the competition. Competition can be fun.

I denigrated Greenblatt's characterization of the contest.

Your answer is much, much better and I find myself in general agreement with it, although in the case of the Nobel it is up to the researchers themselves to decide what to work on and not a specific given task.

It's not a contest I personally have much interest in, because I don't believe my time would best benefit humanity by developing migration tools to Ingres. The only possible reasons for my participation would be for the money and public recognition of winning.

If, however, CA wishes to alleviate any financial hardship on my part by depositing a million after taxes bucks in my bank account I'd be absolutely delighted to devote much of what remains of my life toward developing Ingres to fully support the relational calculus for the good of humanity.

However, I'll note that no single programmer is slated to win the million. The prize, as is the case with most contests (including the Nobel), is to be divided up between participants. It is the total of prizes to be awarded, not a "winner takes all" pot.

KFG

Re:Some of these questions were answered

[justins]

As it is this contest appears not to be either compensation or "alleviation", but rather a splashy offer in order to grab a lot of free headline space.

Which is all a big million-dollar contest is ever likely to be, when you think about it.

Re:Some of these questions were answered

[PenguinBoyDave]

IBM's billion dollar commitment is nice, but CA has invested MUCH more than the one million you complain about. Founding member of the ODSL. Backing several Open Source projects, including the Plone project and kgem. MAKING AN EFFORT TO CHANGE THE BUSINESS MODEL TO BENEFIT OPEN SOURCE AND THE COMMUNITY...and you complain.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[perlchild]

I'm surprised how few people used Ingres before... At least one Univ Lab I went to, years ago, was very pro-ingres(not the r3, but the original, for educational institutions-only) version. Because of some philosophy choices made in the relational algebra.

But then, since these aren't "business" advantages, maybe nobody heard of them except that particular lab...

Ingres to M$SQL

[TheSync]

Where I work we are dumping Ingres for Microsoft SQL Server...it is really an issue of standardization and ease of development.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[avronius]

Actually Greenblat doesn't smear any products in his responses.

He is merely saying that his product *will* be the next generation of blah blah blah.

He does not, at any point, say anything negative about PostgreSQL or MySQL. In fact, it is abundantly obvious that he is not interested in smearing these two products. He knows that his product will both directly compete with, as well as need to interoperate or exchange data with, these products.

I agree that he has not discussed any of the potential advantages of the Ingres database. There may not be any, or he may be unable to convey what sets his product apart from the competitors. But suggesting that he is lying, is a little over the top.

It is also interesting to suggest that comfort and familiarity would be restrictions for the slashdot crowd. The bulk of this community appears to embrace change (and their new CA overlords - sorry, couldn't resist). In fact, it is change that draws most of us to the IT industry.

Maybe you have read more into his statements than is actually there?

What about PGP?

[ImaLamer]

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?

Why no mention of PGP? Seems to me that once they got ahold of it they ruined it. It went from consumer level application to corporate level application... taking it out of the very hands of people who it was written for.

Re:What about PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was NETWORK ASSOCIATES you cheeky monkey.

Re:What about PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, I think that a good question would be:

When are you going to change your name for not being mistaken with Network Associates?

PGP was a NAI product ;-)

Re:What about PGP?

[Arimus]

Which pillock mod'd this up to insightful?
In simple terms :
CA != NAI

PGP was brought by Network Associates Inc. (or is it Int.?) and not CA. NAI being the same people behind McAfee.

Re:What about PGP?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Why no mention of PGP?

Uhh, I guess you have to mod the parent down. He is thinking of Network Associates and not Computer Associates.

Computer Associates had VisiCalc (Know as SuperCalc by that time). They also had Simply Money. They almost killed ARCserve with ARCServeIT. But now ARCserve is doing well.

Re:What about PGP?

[ImaLamer]

Okay, my mistake.... I'll die now.

Re:What about PGP?

[Arimus]

;> Your death is considered a suitable retribution for your crimes...

Re:ask slashdot

[shufler]

I thought the wheelbarrow was to carry away all the manure found in most interviews.

Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

*CA sold the subsidiary ACCPAC International to The Sage Group
in December 2003. The sale of ACCPAC culminated CA's multi-year effort to exit the business applications market and focus the company's strategy on management software.

So he's basically agreeing that AccPac died after they bought it.

CA's is just using this as a tax break for releasing the ingres database as open source software. And if CA could develop/test/release the conversion software it would cost more than $1 million. This is simply just a PR move to get good press for CA and nothing more.

I think at some point companies need to stop releasing their open source software to the public under their own license terms and simply use one of the accepted licenses already in place such as Apache License, GPL, LGPL....

Re:Disagree

[LurkerXXX]

They need to, or you want them to?

Re:Disagree

[PenguinBoyDave]

The CA Trusted Open Source License is a good thing. It protects the user, and still gives you the benefits of the GPL.

Reminds me of The Onion

[GojiraDeMonstah]

In those "Ask A [XYZ]" series (e.g., Ask a Conspiracy Theorist, Ask a Chatroom, Ask a Gut-Shot Policeman, Ask a High School Student Who Didn't Do the Required Reading). It's a fake advice column where the answers given have absolutely nothing to do with the question.

Mod parent up please....

[Hanzie]

The parent is the first post on this thread that actually rates +1 informative.

Where are yesterday's mod points, now that I need them today?

hanzie.

Planting the seed for sco style litigation later.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about opening the source... allowing the creation of fertile grounds for a little SCO style lawsuit action against MySQL and Postgress?

A tiny seed planted now might provide some useful litigation later. And a million bucks is cheap fertilizer to make sure eyes touch the code.

FM Petain

What about Super Calc?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having spent a significant amount of time in my yute learning SC5(their dos spreadsheet proggie) I was irritated that to get a windows version required buying some big accounting program or database program, i forget what the deal was exactly, which was why we ended up going to Quattro.

Just curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious - why nobody ever mentioned MaxDB (former SAP DB) ? It is monstruosity already and it is GPLed for a while, how can MySQL and PostgreSQL be the only databases mentioned in question 5 ?

Re:Just curious...

[DAldredge]

Easy, it currently has low mindshare and even bringing it up has the effect of increasing people interest in it.

Re:Planting the seed for sco style litigation late

[kfg]

I don't really see it. In this case all of these projects had their genesis in freely distributed IBM research and IBM itself funded Berkeley's early Ingres development and it is the current rights holder to the specific product that is explicitly releasing the current code base as Open Source.

SCO's litigation rests on the rather shakey ground that they own code by contractual obligation with IBM who actually wrote the code and that their own distribution of that code under the GPL doesn't count against them because it was not themselves, as the rights holder, who actually released the code as Open Source.

So I suppose you could squabble over a few lines of specific code if you wanted to, but the core technology of the relational calculus and SQL is IBM's, has always been IBM's and was always made available for development under free license with Ingres itself first available under a BSD license with IBM's explicit blessings.

KFG

Michael Flatley?

[InfiniteWisdom]

The whole interview was arrogant. He is worse than Michael Flatley I can understand his loyality to his product, but give us some reasons. Convience, rather than belittle us The slashdot community is NOT gullible

Whats Michael Flatley got to do with it? Last time I checked he was busy tap dancing, not really trying to convince anyone of software products or belittle and community of geeks. I have got to say, you're worse than Luchiano Pavarotti

Re:Michael Flatley?

[KillaKen187]

Flatley says he is the best dancer in the world and that no one can dance better than him... that's why he quit Riverdance and started Lord of the Dance. Pavarotti is a better example though :)

Never mind that...

[Ayanami Rei]

Never mind that Ingres begat Sybase which begat SQL Server.
Microsoft just added the features particularly suited to it's environment... well there you go.

Clueless or Martetroid?

[Queuetue]

I'm trying to determine if he didn't answer any questiosn because he simply doesn't know any of the answers, or if he didn't answer any questiosn because he's afraid it would show him in a bad light.

Especially where the claim that Ingres will be chosen because it "is the most functional and best database in the open source market today", but he cannot give even a single reason why this is so.

I assume this whole maneuver is spin applied from a neuvo-dinosaur, trying to prove it relevance in an increasingly shrinking market. The unaddressed question about postgres was really the important one to address: If you wanted to go with an OSS database, why not go with the market leader? If you wanted to open up your own database, why not release it via the GPL or BSD, allowing it to be merged with another db project?

This guy appears to be a mouthpiece for a company that has no intention of supporting the OSS community - instead it wants to try and 'pull an IBM' by getting free developers, without understanding how IBM has joined the community and stopped acting like a coporate predator towards us. Hucking money in isn't the solution, CA.

Re:Clueless or Martetroid?

[PenguinBoyDave]

http://www.ca.com/opensource/

The questions are the answers?

[mikaelhg]

Could it be that the person to whom these questions were put knew that they would be answered by the most bland and beige PR people and lawyers around, and that he knew that the only way to get around the PR wall and present his true opinion would be to pick out of all submissions, those questions which presented his own viewpoint?

Give me a break

[mefus]

Dude, he was answering questions as to why opening Ingres was an advantage. That's his problem space.

His answer:

Innovation! Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!

Opinion

[Quill_28]

>There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most
>functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

Not being a database person, would those who know more than I agree that ingres is the
'the most functional and robust database in the marketplace' at open-source?

Ingres database has no value

[puppetman]

To paraphrase some of the comments by developers etc on the Postgres mailing list, if this database had any commercial value left to the company, they'd still be holding onto it.

By releasing it, they've shown how valueless it really is. To quote Tom Lane (whole post here)

"If they thought they could still make a dime off it, they'd have kept it. Since they don't think they can, what is a rational assumption about the value of the code to the rest of us?"

I suspect they are hoping some free development will make it relevant once again, and possibly boost consulting services, and the sale of other products that rely on it.

Re:Ingres database has no value

[10scjed]

not to mention the fact that noone at CA understands ingres, they embed it in alot of their products but cant support it at all. ARCserve, for instance, doesnt even use the CA ingres db engine, it uses velocis, because of the problems that CA has supporting ingres. in a conversation i once had with a senior support person in development regarding errorcodes, they stated that the errorcodes are dynamically generated based on the environment at the time of the error, and noone at CA know how to discern exactly what they mean- the same problem can have multiple errorcodes depending on what other programs were running in memory at the time, etc. this is an attempt for CA to get some people working on Ingres who can understand and improve the code, without having to actually pay anyone.

Re:Ingres database has no value

[jregel]

Brightstor Enterprise Backup (aka Arcserve) on Solaris has Ingres as its database backend. The Windows versions doesn't (yet), but they are serious about moving all their products to Ingres.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[justins]

So why bother lying?

Since you're using a rather novel definition of "lying," maybe you ought to define "truth" for us so we'll know what the hell you're talking about.

These weird, angry rants are just one reason why the OSS community and Slashdot in particuarly are not taken very seriously by the wider business world. The guy offers up his time, answers some poorly-formulated and edited questions, and gets shat on.

It's pretty clear that nothing the guy said could have made people happy. Which, coincidentally, is probably why he offered such watered-down, generalized answers.

Re:bah

[Anonymous Coward]

What was a senior executive at a publicly traded company expecting from slashdot? Unquestioning acceptance of the non-answers? Glazed blank stares?

More info on ingres R3 Features

[Kenbo]

This is a link to a pdf listing the new features of R3 and what is and is not included in the open source release.
http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingres / documents/product/ingresr3/A001811E.pdf

It seems (from the document) that it's a pretty powerful product. I would hope that they would take the time to set up at least the basis of a support community like IBM did with eclipse.

What language was he speaking?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think these responses are from a real human.

I think CA modified the the old Eliza program to respond with PR speak.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[Herbmaster]

Okay, in Greenblatt's defense, my question was about 50% troll. But the latter part of my question, the proposal to drop Ingres in favor of developing postgresql, is a totally valid question, even if completely implausible. And the first part of the question could have been a real softball, setting him up to deliver a slam-dunk, naming a feature or two where Ingres really shines that the other open source databases don't offer. (I'm sure there are such features, even if they are overshadowed by Ingres's other shortcomings.)

And Greenblatt dropped the ball. He didn't even pretend to answer the question! I asked "Why X instead of Y?" and he said "X++. A, B, and C. We're going to do Z." Pathetic.

I suspect one of two things: Greenblatt doesn't really buy the whole Ingres/OSS vision himself, or his answers were engineered/filtered by a CA committee.

Disingenuous to say the least

[Anonymous Coward]

This gem in particular caught my eye:

By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation.

What "we"?

We as in Computer Associates? Nope.

We as in freebie developers conned into working on our code for us? Yep.

Greenblatt's TODO

[Anonymous Coward]

Greenblatt's TODO: Detailed answers go here.

Re:Greenblatt's TODO

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHAHA!
I almost spilled my coffee on top of my keyboard!

And what did we expect?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

I expected very little. Oddly enough, I got even less. 8^/

It's been over a decade since I had anything to do with these guys. A company I worked for in the early 90s was to do some contract work for them. They were sleazy enough that our company decreed we would never deal with them again. I was not aware of any other company who drove us to such a decision.

Personally, I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could throw their Long Island building. Which was a pretty depressing place, too...

Re:And what did we expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

CA is out of touch with the oss community. It shows, yet again, in this interview.

So, exactly how many oss developers have jumped on the ingres project? Few, indeed.

I get the feeling that CA is just eyeing the oss community with $$ signs in their eyes, looking to exploit all this free labor, and not looking to give anything worthwhile back.

Ignore the $$$

[mrhandstand]

just for a moment...

A large company, trying to understand and work with the open source community, takes a database that they have and use, and provide the source code. Developers can extend, improve, learn from (both good and bad) the lessons of other professional developers. Wouldn't you say that this is a good thing?

Now, they also provide up to 1 million dollars to fund an open source project to work on and learn from/about said code.

Last I checked, the code and the $$$ was a donation, a gift. I know CA will benefit from the project, JUST LIKE EVERYONE CAN BENEFIT from OSS. Except it's costing CA a lot of cast. I know that commercial development isn't cheap, but $1000000 is a HELL of a lot more funding than most open source projects get.

And as for all the people talking about how there are no feature comparisions, do you really expect a VP to geek out and do a comparison with PostGres vs. MySQL vs. Ingres replication methods? Come on.

Re:Ignore the $$$

[PenguinBoyDave]

Agreed. My point exactly. Maybe the way they are doing it isn't perfect, but they are trying, and these people on this list do nothing but complain and throw rocks. With people like this in the Open Source community, makes me want to jump ship and go back to Microsoft...you don't hear their users bickering about someone trying to do the right thing...

Ingress & OSS

[salesgeek]

Actually, having Ingress become OSS is great. Sure, it isn't what it once was, but it still is a very powerful RDBMS. It's also already enterprise grade, so there's now one more options for FOSS development. Seriously: let's call the cup half full for a change.

Aslo - when we have a free shot at an CEO, let's start aksing questioins that they can answer. Why one DB over another isn't a good questioin. What do you see the impact of Ingress being open source on the DBMS market is a good questioin. CEOs are generalists, not specialists. CA did this for a very specific reason, and it may actually be a good thing...

then again we are talking about CA.

where are the answers?

[sad_]

I can see the questions, but where are the answers?
Send back these questions and get some real answers this time.

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[scarletpimpernel212]

Ingres open source database on the rise

By Robert Westervelt, News Writer
19 Aug 2004 | SearchDatabase.com

Tyler McGraw, a database administrator at Bowater Inc., a paper maker in Greeneville, S.C., is finished making excuses for being an Ingres DBA.

McGraw, who is also works sometimes as an Oracle DBA, said he has often had trouble keeping up in conversations with other IT professionals at industry trade shows and conventions. Now, though, Computer Associates International Inc.'s decision to turn Ingres over to the open source community, and compete directly with MySQL has changed all that.

McGraw, who has maintained Ingres DBMS at Bowater for 15 years, said his company's global paper operations depend on the reliable product.

"Mainly there's been a perception that it has less features, or is less robust -- and that's simply not true," McGraw said. "Our Ingres database is how we ship paper all over the world. And if it were to fail, we wouldn't be able to keep our operations running."

For more information
Read our open source case studies

Visit our open source center

Ingres was originally developed as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, during the mid-'70s. It became a commercial DBMS in the mid-'80s, with features and reliability comparable to Oracle, said Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

"Ingres is known for its reliability and strong relational database features but still remains behind the top commercial DBMS players," Yuhanna said. "We've heard very good comments about Igres in terms of performance scalability and feature sets, and it's definitely going to be an important open source database, competing for a strong deployment adoption rate."

CA is releasing the Ingres code under its CA Trusted Open Source License. Under the license, CA retains ownership of the code and could take the code back in the future.

Ingres' maturity gives it an advantage over MySQL and other open source DBMSes, Yuhanna said. Unicode data support, table partitioning, parallel query, online table reorganization, triggers, bi-directional replication, automatic space management and program language precompilers are key features in Ingres that are not commonly found in other open source databases, Yuhanna said.

The DBMS also has XML support, scalable clusters and Microsoft .NET integration, Yuhanna said. New administration tools and added support from third-party vendors should improve Ingres' deployment rate, Yuhanna said.

Ingres' problem was that it was owned by companies in the '80s that couldn't penetrate the market dominance of Oracle, said Dwight Coles, an application developer at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Coles served as a DBA maintaining Ingres in the '80s and was a member of the New Mexico Ingres Users Group, before it disbanded in '97, because of a lack of interest.

"At one point it was second in market share behind Oracle and we were proud of its prominence," Coles said. "It was always simpler and was almost always competitive in performance, and at one point we felt it was technologically superior to Oracle."

Greenblatt not being unreasonable

[0x0d0a]

What are you *talking* about?

Let's take a look at the questions.

Some of them were, frankly, insults, and the sort of thing that I'm embarassed to have coming from Slashdot.

Some of them attacked CA's tendency to "kill off" products. Well, for Chrissake, this guy just did the *exact opposite* -- he open sourced something so that it can be developed and used and maintained.

I mean, it sounds like CA has an awfully low degree of respect among the masses of IT people on this board -- and people were being pretty frank about their opinions. *However*, I don't understand why people were so incredibly angry about Ingres. There was only one relevant, non-insulting question that I really saw on there.

Spot on

[0x0d0a]

Let's take a look at the interview:

You had:

(a) People complaining about treatment of past software products, really pretty much ignoring Ingres. This has nothing to do with the stated topic of the interview.

(b) People complaining (now) that there is $1M involved. Come *on*. People hack on company-backed stuff for free, like MySQL or Evolution. If they want to give out money, fine. There's certainly no requirement to take any. You could donate it to the FSF.

(c) Demands for feature comparisons were, frankly, stupid. This is the CEO. He's going to know the strategic point of what's going on,a nd that sort of stuff. Not only is he probably not the best person to ask about feature comparisons, but there are probably such comparisons on their website.

Really, the entire interview was kind of a depressing way for Slashdot and the OSS world to deal with a company that is trying (potentially clumsily, yes) to donate some code to the OSS world and jump on the bandwagon. I remember that IBM used to get slagged on *all the time* when they first when OSSish. Does everyone have to pass a trial of fire by insult?

Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin

[flame_bait_mcgrattan]

Contributing Ingres to the open source community could not have happened without Sam's support, assistance, guidance and commitment to the success of the project. We within CA greatly admire and respect the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities and believe that there's room for all three of us, and more, in the opensource database arena which is probably why Sam didn't get into a feature function comparison here on slashdot. Ingres r3 provides support for: Transactions; Views; Database proceudres; Rules; Database events; User defined functions and data types; Partitioned tables; Parallele query support; Fedearated databases; row, page, table and database locking; Replication; 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K and 64K database pages; C2 Security; Auditing; Royalty free redistribution under the CATOSL For those of you who weren't aware of it, the name Postgres is a contraction of Post-Ingres. Postgres was a project founded at UC Berkeley by Michael Stonebreaker, one of the founders of the Ingres project at UC Berkeley. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database engine targeted at small to medium deployments. The PostgreSQL architecture is very similar to an older Ingres archicture that was found not to scale well in large enterprises and which was reengineered by the Ingre steam about fifteen years ago. Ingres is a robust, reliable and scalable relational database, providing a rich feature set similar to that of PostgreSQL that is suited to small, medium and large scale deployments. Our product management team will post a feature function comparison matrix on our open source site for those who are really interested in this type of tick in the box comparison.

putting the record straight

[emmak8]

Contributing Ingres to the open source community could not have happened without Sam Greenblatt's support, assistance, guidance and commitment to the success of the project.

We within CA greatly admire and respect the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities and believe that there's room for all three of us, and more, in the open source database arena which is probably why Sam didn't get into a feature function comparison here on Slashdot.

Ingres r3 provides support for:
Transactions;
Views;
Database procedures;
Rules;
Database events;
User defined functions and data types;
Partitioned tables;
Paralleled query support;
Federated databases;
row, page, table and database locking;
Replication;
2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K and 64K database pages;
C2 Security;
Auditing;
Royalty free redistribution under the CATOSL

For those of you who weren't aware of it, the name Postgres is a contraction of Post-Ingres. Postgres was a project founded at UC Berkeley by Michael Stonebreaker, one of the founders of the Ingres project at UC Berkeley. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database engine targeted at small to medium deployments. The PostgreSQL architecture is very similar to an older Ingres architecture that was found not to scale well in large enterprises and which was reengineered by the Ingres team about fifteen years ago. Ingres is a robust, reliable and scalable relational database, providing a rich feature set similar to that of PostgreSQL that is suited to small, medium and large scale deployments.

MySQL is well suited to read only applications and to serving up HTML content, but it lacks the feature set required to support transactional applicaitons in large enterprise deployments.

Our product management team will post a feature function comparison matrix on our open source site for those who are really interested in this type of tick in the box comparison.

Emma K McGrattan
Ingres Project Owner

Re:putting the record straight

[lscoughlin]

You rule. Post more often!

Advantages

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want answers to questions like that, why don't you give Computer Associates a call ? Unlike the suppliers of other Open Source DBMS products (MYSQL, Postgres, etc) CA actually have offices around the world and people you can talk to.

Ingres is a serious DBMS. My employer has used it successfully for the past 12 years, and we have found it to be exceptionally reliable, a solid performer, and requires little in the way of maintenance. Furthermore here in Australia the support from Computer Associates is very good - better than we have recently found with support for Oracle.

Recently we had to acquire an Oracle DBMS - an application vendor that was supporting Ingres decided to drop support (just before Ingres R3 went open source :-( ). Our DBA just shakes his head at the Oracle system - essentially it looks like Oracle is the choice you pick when you want job security, a high salary, and the chance to tinker.

A good indicator as to what Ingres can do is the way it is being used by CA in it's other products. Ingres can be embedded within an application as a black box DBMS and it just runs without DBA assistance. This kind of stability and reliability translates well to more data centric applications, where you want a back end system that works without having to employ expensive specialist dedicated staff to manage it. I know you can do similar things with MYSQL, but I don't see anyone doing it with Oracle ;-)

Personally the only disadvantages to Ingres I have seen are the absence of solid support in Perl & PHP - I know they are there, but the PHP library loacks good error reporting, and according to the readme shipped with the Perl DBI drivers it's not as solid as it could be). I use these technologies, and I know they are good, but there's a bit of a slope to climb before they make par.

Re:Long time Ingres experience

[NibbleAbit]

Late post, but someone might read it. I have used Ingres extensively since '93 and postges since '98. Both are robust and reliable, however the tools surrounding the Ingres database engine are more mature than those available for postgres. I'm also not aware of 4gl application development tools available for postgres. The report writer that comes with ingres is a bit week, but still good enough, but the 4gl is great. Also, some of the administration tools are powerful and easy to use. ( like the way postgres does some things (data typing, udf's, blobs), and what I would really like to see is some merging of the two products into a much better one.

Wow, there's something wrong with this guy

[drinkypoo]

There's something vitally wrong with almost every answer. Let the flamage begin:

Open source should never be viewed as a mechanism to jettison products.

Why not? I can think of reasons you wouldn't, like the fact that so much software contains proprietary code which cannot be open-sourced. But just what's wrong with open-sourcing when you're done with something?

There is no question that CA could have and would have built these tools but we decided to challenge the community to build these tools and to begin working with CA on open source projects around Ingres.

If CA is so successful, and so capable, why didn't they just write these tools and then sell them, or use them to enhance the value of Ingres? Answer: He's lying.

CA has been systematically working to improve its relationships with customers.

What, you mean by not lying to them about anything and everything? Or maybe when you sell them several million dollars of software you actually guarantee that it works? I suspect that's too much to expect, really.

why should I as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?

...There is no question that when this is done there will be no doubt in the users' mind that they need the most functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.

No question? Way to avoid answering the question. Either he knows something I don't know about why Ingres sucks and therefore elected not to answer it, or he knows too little about Ingres to answer it intelligently. Either way, it's disappointing.

Soon after the acquisition, CA made Cosmo available on the web for free distribution, but never announced any plans for releasing the product into open source.

Well, let's just look at that webpage shall we? All I see is the cosmo player there. Hmm, now let's look at this snippet of text from the about cosmo page:

Cosmo Software, a Computer Associates company, provides leading-edge content creation tools, focusing on next-generation Web technologies, including MetaStream, VRML, and Java. To Internet users everywhere, the company distributes the Web's premier VRML 2.0 viewer, Cosmo Player, along with WorldView 2.0 from Intervista and MetaStream 2 from MetaStream.com.

In otherwords, *cough*BULLSHIT*cough*. Cosmo Player is freely downloadable. The content creation tools, on the other hand, are either unavailable, or commercial.

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.

Ingres is a fantastic technology. Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system. By open sourcing Ingres, we will create the next generation of database and application innovation. CA will embed a management database based on Ingres into several core technologies.

1. Ingres is not a technology, it's an RDBMS.
2. "Open innovation has been blocked above the operating system." What the hell does this mean? Below the operating system is the hardware, above it are the applications. Last time I checked, there was plenty of application-level innovation going in open source software. In fact, aside from polishing, it seems that open source software is where all the innovation is coming from. Well, there and from small companies bought up by Microsoft. CA's idea of innovation is to make the interface to Unicenter TNG a 3D one that runs only on windows so even in a Unix-only shop you have to add a PC with a 3D graphics card to manage your network. Good call there, sports.

This is a non-response response. Why even bother posting this? The story should have just said "This asshat avoided actually answering any of our questions. News at eleven" and never bothered to post his pathetic propaganda.

CA Graveyard

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work we have an informal question on our vendor assessment - how likely is it that CA will buy this company. It is truly one of our great fears with any product . Too many bad experiences with CA. It's not so much that CA "kills" products, they just tend to lose any inspiration, and do little to update the product. Sometimes they do a few unexciting releases, but often they don't do much more than rebrand it. In their defence, they're usually buying companies that are in financial difficulty, so it would be somewhat foolhardy for them to invest too much money in a product that already sent one company under.

Re:bah

[Anonymous Coward]

CA is out of touch with the oss community. It shows, yet again, in this interview.

So, exactly how many oss developers have jumped on the ingres project? Few, indeed.

I get the feeling that CA is just eyeing the oss community with $$ signs in their eyes, looking to exploit all this free labor, and not looking to give anything worthwhile back.