Slashdot Mirror
CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results
Anil Kandangath writes "Last year, Computer Associates open sourced their Ingres DMBS and they also announced a $1mn bounty for open source conversion toolkits from other databases to Ingres. Well, the toolkits are up on SourceForge and the bounty has been won by three teams, two from India and one from New York. More details and links to the projects on the CA news page. This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code."
- Sit around and wait for a Fortune 500 company to issue a $1M bounty
- Try to code a solution and hope you actually win (was: ???)
- Profit!!
I think I'm going to quit my day job now. This looks like a great business model, not to mention an excellent way to pay the mortgage.What kind of bounty is $1mn?
$1 x (10^-3) x (10^-9) = $1 x 10^-12.
No thanks.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Two of those contestants worked for Oracle... ...and released a tool to ease migration from Oracle to CA's database.
Boy I hope Oracle doesn't hear about this.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
2 of the top 3 teams are from india, and the third entry from NY is an Indian guy.
Changing trends.
Cheaper, definitely. Whether or not a team scrambling to meet a bounty deadline results in better code is open to debate.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
$1mn - 1 million dollars worth of nuts?
This appears to be another front that Microsoft is being attacked from. Hopefully it will reduce the number of users of the unsecure MS SQL server.
development practices or methodology were used by the teams? It is impressive to see fairly major projects like this come so far in a single year's time.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Judging from their surnames... maybe US companies oursource to India not only because they are, oh so much cheaper, but 'cause US coders, uhm, suck...
Well, do they ?
50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?
Being an American, I really admire the Indian guys...
While most of us whine about losing jobs to outsourcing, they are really marching ahead in leaps and bounds...
I've often wished universities would do stuff like this. They have large scale software needs, (usually) a significant budget, and a lot of complex and fairly unique product requirements. I would think funding open source tools would appeal to them both in an economic and academic way.
Anybody who watched a Peoplesoft deployment at a university (and there were many of them) had to be both amused and shocked. I know my school spent millions - first to y2k proof an old system, then when that didn't satisfy them to go ahead and "upgraded" to Peoplesoft anyway. The result, at least from the student and professor point of view, was a nightmare. Buggy, klunky, and unpolished by any definition. I kept wondering why five or six universities couldn't have pooled their resources behind the GNU enterprise people. GNU enterprise + postgresql/ingres/whatever + other open web technologies couldn't POSSIBLY have done worse, and for that amount of $$ probably would have done MUCH better.
Heck, our CS students probably could have done better than the interface we got stuck with. It's no wonder college costs keep going up if what I saw was typical of university spending decisions.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Sounds great.. Until you think about migrating applications; all those nifty stored procedures, never mind c or java tie-ins. The winners still have a long list of unmapped functions that aren't converted.
So, to what extent are these apps actually ready for the lime light, and to what extent did CA just choose a date to give away some money to grab some "free" publicity?
Also, it reflects quite poorly on all the databases (Oracle, DB2, and Ingres itself) that you *need* tools like this. If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I remember one particular scam I heard about when I first started looking for a job (I'm looking in Finance, but saw many CS programming ads as well) - it went a little something like this:
(a) Place job offer in newspaper
(b) Interview a bunch of candidates
(c) "Test" them all by making them write code to solve your problems for you while not being on the payroll.
(d) "Hire" one person, enjoy working code.
I can only imagine how much invaluable code this company got from making this $1m offer. I can guarantee you it was probably worth a helluva lot more than $1m. But, of course, none of the other entrants received a penny. This is just a glorified example of what I described above.
If this is the current state of labor in the programming sector, I worry and feel truly bad for you poor folks out there looking.
Data Mace Banishment System?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm glad to see that CA followed-through on this. While I am not sure how many people will actually migrate to Ingres, the fact that they put up the money, had non-CA judges review the entries, and gave them the recognition they deserve, to me anyway, shows that CA is making a good faith effort to show the Open Source Community that they indeed want to change the direction that CA has gone in the past. I see this as a good thing.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
No wonder the winners are from India.
A Correspondent in Mumbai | May 18, 2005 16:45 IST
Are Indian's the smartest software programmers? It sure seems so!
Are Indians the smartest writers? It doesn't seem so!
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
It makes sense that those from India are superb programmers and won this contest -- so many of our IT jobs are being outsourced over there.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 SU CK IT MP AA
I worked with Ingress on the PC over SCO Unix
in the early 90's and found it so much easier to work with than Oracle. That said, this
is really old technology, right? Does
it really deserve a big whup?
Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger
(or perhaps is just killing me really, really
slowly...)
It is by coff... er, will, alone I set my mind in motion...
Actually the new york entry is also by an indian. Hurraah !!!
Some of my best VB code was one that converted money to words. The other was report printing depending on what the user selected...all was done on the fly. I have no idea how I'd implement that in kexi. This I guess will call for learning a new language. I know there is an opensource one on sourceforge but it's not there yet.
for Informix, DB2, and Sybase. Unfortunately, the deadline has passed. If the converters are released as open-source, perhaps the tools can be enhanced to accommodate these other RDBMS
This turns it into a race. In the rush to be first, many things will just be hacked together rather than properly written/tested/thought out.
or something....
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A million buckaroos? That's a whole lotta' curry!
from tfa:
:)
"Are Indian's the smartest software programmers? It sure seems so!"
Work on the punctuation and get back to us...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Are we just making up abbreviations now? What exactly is $1mn? Is mn some currency I have never heard of? Does it mean something special about the award?
Seriously, after about 10 seconds I realized it stood for million, but lets refer to our good friend Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 4,220 for $1mn
Results 1 - 10 of about 111,000 for $1mil
Results 1 - 10 of about 621,000 for $1M
How about "$1M" or "1 million dollars"?
Dude, but you will have to compete against Indians. Just look at this case, 2 teams from India and third guy is from NY but Indian.
What a wonderful way to get a lot of people to waste their time and profit from it. Let's see if this can be rephrased for better comprehension...
Your Dream Job!!!
Gifted developer's needed to create DB conversion utilities to facilitate adoption of newly open sourced database. Simply put a team together and invest a year of your own time to develop a candidate project. If it happens to rise above the competition (perhaps a one in five chance if we don't get too many responses), you will actually be paid!!!
...Thanks, but no thanks. I sure hope the world isn't so full of suckers that this approach becomes widespread. I like being able to feed my family.
Only $550,000 was actually awarded out of a total pool of $1mn (mn? wtf?):
The winning projects were: Shift2Ingres, submitted by Harsh Azad, Rohit Gaddi, Achal Rastogi, Geetanjali Bahuguna and Ashutosh Upadhyay of New Delhi, India, won the largest prize of $400,000; EzyMigrate, submitted by Danes John and Varghese Jacob of Kerala, India, was awarded a prize of $100,000; and DbConverter, submitted by Bipin Prasad of New York, was awarded a prize of $50,000.
Here's links to the winning projects:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/shift2ingres
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ezymigrate
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/dbcvt
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
India never ceases to amaze me. No bias there of course :) ... Power to my people!
Linux Resources
informative you assholes.. learn to mod
Well done to all three teams, and a pat on the back for CA.
It would make very interesting reading to hear how all three went about the task, from requirements all the way to delivery.
Maybe someone has links to the teams' sites?
I wish SourceForge's community features were more sophisticated. I'd like teams to be able to collaborate with each other more, for projects to be created as requirements with bounties (then populated by teams), for projects to advertise bounties required for completion. Maybe with negotiation features, like auctions or otherwise, to determine bounty amounts and acceptance tests.
--
make install -not war
heh. /. !
And Taco says nobody bothers to read the comments on
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In the time that you guys have posted yet another oh-so-cutting remark about spelling and grammar, those Indian guys have probably written another code module.
And then you complain about out-sourcing.
You lose.
1. Begin working online, i've seen sites which offer bounties (or bids actually) for ceratin projects.
2. Eventually more open source bounties begin appearing. Pick them if you can.
3. Constant profit!
Was it that hard to figure out?
Indian programmers who work on open-source projects are capitalistic bastards. Ever seen a desi begin (leave alone release) an open-source product without getting paid for it?
ALL these programmers - whether India-based or from New York - are Indian. OK... one of them is probably an American.
Sourceforge provides a great playfield and stadium, and even some basic yet helpful infrastructure. But like the parent suggests, it doesn't actually promote any collaboration as such.
This would be a very useful area for improvement, and not just through bounties. How about some simple collaborative visual tools? A collaborative idea outliner and a basic multiuser whiteboard would help immensely for starters, as well as elementary project progress charts so that people can see things happening without having to get immersed in the mailing lists.
As things stand, beyond SF's corner all these FOSS projects are a black box. This needs some improvement to make the work more visibly open.
Now it might make sense that there was a somewhat different distribution for the two contests but be real... this demands an explanation.
Seastead this.
and could be twenty nuts and fifty thousand dollars - or two million dollars and half a nut.
However, its ten thousand nuts and a hundred dollars if they don't like you.
'cause US coders, uhm, suck
Well, who can blame US coders for sucking, when as soon as they code something, US patent squatters and copyright lawyers sue their companies to hell and back?
The US is basically dead as far as software product is concerned. There's heaps of activity of course, but it's the trashings of a dying eagle, chained to the rocks by lawyers while the eastern tide is rolling in.
I submitted the story, so I should take responsibility for the typos there.
1. $1mn... stupid me, that should have been $1M.
2. DMBS... aah..dyslexia? well, that should have been DBMS.
Also, the reason why I said that this model will produce cheaper (obviously) and better code is that since it will be open-sourced, even if the original code might have taken shortcuts to make the deadline, it is still out there for anyone to tinker with and fix (if needed). And it almost guarantees continuous development.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I thought Ingres has been superceded by Postgres many moons ago. Does anyone know whether Ingres offer anything worth while?
Oh well, what the hell...
I guess it sucks to be you if you just spent the last several months of your life trying to do this and just got beat.
It makes me wonder where the US (not the New Yorker from India) placed in this and where their submissions are - I highly doubt that their submissions would be that bad on their own. I just see this as another PR article for offshoring to downplay the problem of US being high enough quality to have to fix offshored code regularly(and thus negating any "competitive advantage" the Far East has).
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
You nicely summarized all of the common racial stereotypes.
Americans and Brits are likely better programmers than the average person from somewhere else, only becuase they have the best teachers.
Really? Isn't U.S. education supposed to be the worst in the world?
Do you have any evidence to back up anything you say?
The guy in New York got $50K for his efforts, which will pay for maybe 9mos living expenses, yet the teams from India that got the higher payouts ...that buys a hell of a lot of tech toys and a very nice house in India. Hell, probably several houses.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Indeed, and the cycle is self-reinforcing.
The more work that moves over there, the more experienced they will become, and the greater their reputation will be as a result.
But don't blame the people in India and elsewhere, blame the US's love affair with lawyers.
It's pretty much impossible anymore to develop good stuff in the US without the lawyers crawling out of their stinking legal mire and trying to parasite off you, or stop your work altogether. And Europe is following suit.
You'd have to pay us $1 million to go back to Ingres. We've already moved from Ingres to Oracle. Might be willing to move to Cincom though, since that may be the only way to keep our jobs. Be the first to move to newer technologies, be the easiest to juniorize once you get outsourced. Yippee!
I thought Copyrights and Patents were the same thing
(ducks)
Also, what about SCO? Doesn't that cross Linux, Copyright, Patent, and Anti-Establishment? In fact, if someone modded up an iPod to do a Google search for SCO headlines, that'd make all six! Hooray!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
"It seems they over paid as well. You can get 4 Indian programmers for much less than $400K for 9 months ($11,111/month)."
Just because that's above the prevailing price of programming labor in India, does not dictate that every Indian programmer is worth no more than $11,111/month.
In fact, inferring that it does is just plain racist.
If anyone here on slashdot were to make such a claim regarding the Western world ("those OSS developers were paid more than the median salary for their economy as a result of winning a merit-based bounty with their code..... they were overpaid!"), it would be decried outright.
All the names listed there except for the last two work for some firm called Trilogy.
Knowing Indians, I won't be surprised to see that company asking for these developers to work on that product so that they could cash in on the prize amount (their yearly salaries put together would still be eclipsed by the prize.)
I don't consider this proving anything about how good Indians are at software. If these guys were not working for the same firm (like the last two listed there), it would have been a different matter.
Here's the thing, this wasn't a pure programming contest like topcoder. Ability to invest one's own time/funds was a major factor here. What this result says is in part is that Indians are better able to fund medium open source projects than Americans-or for that matter Europeans. I wonder also, how big the teams that worked on these projects really were. Was it just 1-2 guys on all of these project or did they have substantial support from outside the main team?
Now, I personally hadn't heard of this thing before today-or if I did, I just kind of spaced on it. I _was_ kind of suprised the winners of this contest were Java hacks. I can't stand that language myself.
I think the reason many Indians participated, is that the reward was in fact much higher for Indians than e.g. Americans. How many Americans would participate if the reward was $4M for the highest pot? That splits much better 5 ways for Americans.
For an Indian, 1/5th of $400k is still a shitload of money.
For most publications, it's the responsibility of the editors to catch typos (hint, hint).
Does this change the fact that Ingres still sucks?
The top 5 top coders country of residence:
Seastead this.
It would be nice if Computer Associates would open source CA-Realizer. While old and far from prefect, it couldn't hurt to have code and ideas to improve, port to other OSs, or addapted to other GUI programming languages.
Notice, please that one of the winning CA teams was in New York and they were originally from India.
There are lots of Indian programmers in the US and none are Topcoders.
Seastead this.
It's a nice idea. But once the bounty is awarded, there is no more incentive to actively maintain it from the open source community. Without additional bounty, this project will have to compete on level ground with mySQL and PostgreSQL, where a lot of community interests have been vested.
In which of those categories do the Star Wars stories belong?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
India, Fuck yeah
:)
(From Team India: World Hax0rz
sung to the tune of DVDA - America, Fuck yeah!)
India, India...
India - FUCK YEAH
Coming again to save the motherfucking day yeah
India - FUCK YEAH
Free Software is the only way...
Programmers, your day is through
Cuz now you'll have to answer to..
India - FUCK YEAH
So lick my butt and suck on my balls
India - FUCK YEAH
What'cha gonna do when we code for you now!
It's the source that we all share, Its their job for tomorrow!
FUCK YEAH!
Out Sourcing - FUCK YEAH!
Caste System - FUCK YEAH!
Open Source - FUCK YEAH!
Code Bounties - FUCK YEAH!
Tsumanis - FUCK YEAH!
Cheap Programmers - FUCK YEAH!
Nukes - FUCK YEAH!
Kashmir - FUCK YEAH!
Hindus - FUCK YEAH!
Buddhists - FUCK YEAH!
Deserts - FUCK YEAH!
Shacks - FUCK YEAH!
Sacred Cows - FUCK YEAH!
----
(Feel free to add your own!)
Disclamer: Not flamebait, just some good humor... or not.
Who care? Ingres doesn't have much improvement in this few years. Plus their new LICENCE.
I prefer to use other opensource DBs {mysql,firebird,postgresql}
There are lot of exciting feature for Postgresql's next version, such as bitmap index, two pharse commit, range base table partitioning.
Only one thing is good from ingres that is parellel query.
I used to think that Ingress had some real niche possiblities and untless I have been blinded by the fog in this thread, the recent news should have been positive to those few folks who share(d) my views. I can't bring myself to further descend to the comments already modded to troll levels but I ask: Is this because CA and not IBM/Sun/Oracle is taking this action that the response is so weird? Disclamer: I am ex-CA and not particularly parocial about it. Fought what I could when I was in the frey.
I've been working on some research, and to my dismay I discovered that Slashdot has no genuine editors. It's really just a thousand monkeys sitting at keyboards, being fed bananas by OSDN.
The parent claims that Ingress may be to "old" to ever become a useful RDBMS (my paraphrase).
I bet there some bits of crufty code to be found in Oracle's latest release, too.
The "whup" here is if this represents the start of something big: as valuable old code becomes impossible to maintain, start leaking it out and eventually give it away.
Sort of like auctioning away a teenager that eats to much to the highest bidder....
I've never met a programmer that was worth 11K per month based on coding alone, which from my reading of related articles about this "contest" is all they did.
The poster of the original article said
This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code
Notice the cheaper development line? I have a number of friends from India and Bangladesh (sp?) and am always amazed at their recollections of how things "work" in their respective countries. For example, can you bribe your way out of a speeding ticket here for the equivilent of $1? How about running water in your town? It is not racist to point out that they are impoverished countries and as a consequence paying anyone that does a service there 100 times what would be expected and calling it cheaper development is in fact bullshit. At my last job two of the best programmers we had (left right before I started) were Indian and we actively recruited and hired programmers out of college that weren't American because they typically had better attitudes and a better work ethic (whoops I'm being racist against WASPs).
Most people in this world are over-paid in western countries for the work they do. Which is why anyone that cannot succeed in the USA is either very unlucky or very lazy.
I guess you live in a phantom Politically Correct bullshit world you've created around yourself. Next time try and read posts without assuming "racisim" when it doesn't exist.
In "Apple", because SW is gay.
"It is not racist to point out that they are impoverished countries and as a consequence paying anyone that does a service there 100 times what would be expected and calling it cheaper development is in fact bullshit."
Truer words have never been spoken. It's obvious from your reply that I misunderstood the points you had made in your original post, and I accept responsibility for that.
However, reading that post again, I can also recognize that without the clarification of your reply, your original post's meaning is ambiguous.
That's why, although I admit to having misconceived your position, your closing barb about my "Politically Correct bullshit world" is a petty punitive rejoinder that's anything but salient.
My mistake was not "assuming" racism, but incorrectly deducing it from your words. You can choose to belittle me for making a mistaken inference, however despite your claim to the contrary racism does exist, and if you think that's just in the "world [I've] created around [myself]", you're wrong.
2 of the top 3 teams are from india, and the third entry from NY is an Indian guy.
Changing trends.
Hold on Tex, 1 million dollars goes a lot further in India. It is like a 10 million prize to those in the US. That is about ten times the incentive. It is also related to one of the reasons that H-1B's take more shit from bosses: put up with shit for 6 years and retire like a king back home.
Table-ized A.I.