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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."
2 of the top 3 teams are from india, and the third entry from NY is an Indian guy.
Changing trends.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
1 Million dollars is a lot more to an Indian (in India) than a person in the states. It's like having a 10 Million dollar contest in India which is greater incentive. Although you'd think someone from all the OSS groups would have seen it as a valid challenge. My company could sure use $400,000. I'm not sure we would have been inclined to do it without a guarantee though.
What about all the people that tried and failed. No risk for CA, 100% of the risk on the development team/company.
It seems they over paid as well. You can get 4 Indian programmers for much less than $400K for 9 months ($11,111/month).
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
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
Good observation but a closer look explains it. 1) Topcoder payouts are generally micro-payouts. And most of the decent Indian programmers are employed, and hence not "motivated" enough. The CA payout apparently was enough motivation. 2) I haven't looked lately but if I am not mistaken most of the topcoder payouts go to eastern europe. I suspect the decent programmers there have more time on their hands. As these countries catch the outsourcing wave, suspect their numbers on tc will drop accordingly. Yeah, i minored in freudian socialogy.
If you use Ingres, you get to deal with CA's attorneys over any licensing issues that may arise.
If you use PostgreSQL, you get to deal with the 3-clause BSD license and a vibrant developer community.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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.