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CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results
Anil Kandangath writes "Last year, Computer Associates open sourced their Ingres DMBS and they also announced a $1mn bounty for open source conversion toolkits from other databases to Ingres. Well, the toolkits are up on SourceForge and the bounty has been won by three teams, two from India and one from New York. More details and links to the projects on the CA news page. This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code."
Cheaper, definitely. Whether or not a team scrambling to meet a bounty deadline results in better code is open to debate.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Judging from their surnames... maybe US companies oursource to India not only because they are, oh so much cheaper, but 'cause US coders, uhm, suck...
Well, do they ?
50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?
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'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.
You know what would also be cool? If they took your tuition money to Atlantic City and plunked it all down on red 36.
You don't know what you're going to get when you issue a bounty like this. It's a gamble. A good contract has obligations spelled out for both parties.
For every bungled deployment, there are dozens even hundreds that go smoothly. People just don't hop online and bitch when things work right.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
Not really, if nothing meets your needs nobody wins the cash. This is alot different than the government which pays a contractor. If the contractor loses the contract do to poor work, they usually get paid for the work up done to that point.
(d) "Hire" one person, enjoy working code.
Sounds like an urban legend.
Project management is already such a complex process to get right when the developers are all under one roof and able to talk to each other that it would be nearly impossible to get anything remotely like a working system from the process you described. The end result would be more like a mish-mash of routines, all written with subtle differences "standard" input/out data structures and different assumptions about requirements and behaviour.
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.
I doubt that much of the code they received was particularly valuable on its own. Sure it is possible that the code might be incorporated into another project, but it is more than likely that re-inventing the wheel would be easier then re-using code that was a) not written with a plan of re-use and b) the original developers are not even around to ask about how the code works and what kind of ways it expects to interact with other code or systems. Its pretty much an all or nothing proposition - either submissions get used for what they were designed for or they are going to rot away at the bottom of some DVD-R spindle.
Sometimes they do. You just don't notice the non-typos.
In the case of Peoplesoft at Universities, this simply isn't true. I don't think you could find one that went smoothly. Inherent in the process of implementing systems like Peoplesoft is a massive business process reengineering. This is where you reevaluate everything you do, and do it in some other way that fits better with Peoplesoft. For instance, if you are used to having professors work 9 months, but collect their compensation over 12 months, you have to "reengineer" that process. In Peoplesoft, you would pay only during periods where work was performed. The Peoplesoft way is to change your business to match the software.
If for some crazy reason you would like to change the software to match your business... well, that's crazy! But if that's what you want, you end up buying or building elaborate "front-ends" that are practically complete systems in themselves to create buffers between your business and Peoplesoft. For instance, you could have a buffer that collects timecards over 9 months, then feeds that to Peoplesoft over 12 months. Or you could pretend that professors make less monthly and lie about them working yearround. Either way, you have to build a system to manage the "subtlety" without breaking accounting rules. You end up with a "front-end" that is much bigger and more complex than the Peoplesoft modules underneath, and an enormous confusion to most of the staff that interacts with it.
Now think about building such front-ends for every little aspect of the system: Class scheduling, tuition reimbursement, hospital staffing, dorm rental, ... The costs run into tens of millions.
If there is a university that had a smooth Peoplesoft implementation, they must be small enough, and unsophisticated enough that they should never have spent the tens of millions of dollars it takes to implement Peoplesoft. If you aren't able to build a better custom system for 1/2 the cost...then you deserve Peoplesoft.