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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??????
#####
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??????
#####
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.
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.
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...
Where I work we are dumping Ingres for Microsoft SQL Server...it is really an issue of standardization and ease of development.
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.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
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.
--10scjed IANAL,AFAIK