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."

Comments

There's an idea

[The Bungi]

1. Sit around and wait for a Fortune 500 company to issue a $1M bounty
2. Try to code a solution and hope you actually win (was: ???)
3. 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.

Re:There's an idea

[BoomerSooner]

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).

One milli-nano dollar?

[Bingo Foo]

What kind of bounty is $1mn?

$1 x (10^-3) x (10^-9) = $1 x 10^-12.

No thanks.

Re:One milli-nano dollar?

[infinityxi]

So exactly what part of 0.000000000001 states we have owe them money? ;-)

Bad news for two of the guys...

[Loco3KGT]

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.

Re:Bad news for two of the guys...

[hikerhat]

Well, the bounty was more than Oracle would ever pay an Indian programmer over the course of that programmer's career, so I don't think they would care if Oracle found out.

I know I would tell my employer to shove it if I won a few hundred grand.

Team India !~

[Anonymous Coward]

2 of the top 3 teams are from india, and the third entry from NY is an Indian guy.
Changing trends.

Cheaper, definitely.

[shmlco]

...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.

Re:Cheaper, definitely.

[youknowmewell]

Yea, because we all know that inhouse developers scrambling to meet an inhouse deadlines build better code. I mean, you do 1 year of work in 3 months, not bad. Of course you get a bonus double that of last years, from $25 to $50.

Now that's progress.

Does anyone know what sort of...

[under_score]

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.

All Indian ?

[EphemeralPhart]

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 ?

Re:All Indian ?

[TrappedByMyself]

I think it's still a regional thing. You see alot of Indians who are masters at database work, especially Oracle. Many Asians are good at numerical analysis. Eastern Europeans are good at automata theory. Western Europeans are good at geometry. Americans seem more well rounded, not as specialized, or different people in different specializations.

I know these are huge generalizations and that stuff is changing, but I think it has alot to do with where the pioneers end up. Probably some of the early Indians to do computer science work did database work. As they go back home, that's what they know the best, and that's what spreads, and that's what kinds of jobs form.

Most of the pioneering in computer science was in the US and UK, so that's where it spawns from. As the knowledge spreads, skills will too.

As much as the "I hate America" idea is popular around here, Americans and Brits are likely better programmers than the average person from somewhere else, only becuase they have the best teachers. However the rest of the world is quickly catching up.

Universities?

[starseeker]

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.

Re:Universities?

[winkydink]

Way off topic, but a lot of implementations fail beacause:

- Lack of executive commitment to the project
- Business processes are poorly defined/understood
- Consultants are poorly managed

GNU enterprise? Which of the Big 4 is going to sign off on GNU enterprise? Well, I guess if you have enough cash, one of them will, but I'd imagine that one would want to spend one's cash in better ways.

Re:Universities?

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:Universities?

[Perl-Pusher]

You know what would also be cool? If they took your tuition money to Atlantic City and plunked it all down on red 36.

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.

Re:Universities?

[Gribflex]

You ever hear of a product called WebCT? It is a commonly used web application used for distributing course notes, grades, emails, and other related material. An overrated CMS.

Well, here is a brief history of WebCT. (some facts may be slightly off, this is recounted from memory)

It was originally developed at UBC (in Vancouver BC, Canada) by a prof and some students. As it was created at a public institution, using research money from the Government, the prof felt that it should be released for Free (as in beer). His thoughts were that the people had already paid for it through their taxes.

Well, the software took off, and gained a lot of popularity. Then the University stepped in and said 'only people from BC should get this for free, it was mostly funded by provincial money', and so the software remained free for BC organizations, but was sold to people outside of BC.

Then the software was outsourced/sold to a private company who promised to keep the same pricing model (free to BC people, not free to others). They kept up with it a bit, and maintained it a little.

Then that software company sold WebCT again, to a different company. The second company did not promise to keep it free and started charging everyone. The second company also stopped updating the software, and did nothing to improve it. Then they increased the cost. Now they charge people way way too much for software that sucks (read: doesn't work on anything other than IE in Windows).

And every CS student who has ever used the product claims 'I coulda made this crap for free...' and they probably could have, because it was University CS students that did make that crap, and for free.

Every IT department however, seems to think that they can only buy software.

OK, so if it had been released as free (as in speech) software, things would have been a little better, but still.

Migrating applications..

[wfberg]

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..

Wow...Has Tech Labor Truly Become so Cheap?

[ultimabaka]

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.

Re:Wow...Has Tech Labor Truly Become so Cheap?

[Jherek Carnelian]

(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.

Ingres DMBS?

[spun]

Data Mace Banishment System?

Re:$1mn?

[winkydink]

One milli-nut. The amount of testicular fortitude shown by Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot.

Nice payday!

[PenguinBoyDave]

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.

Surprise surprise

[interlingua.ro]

Contest rules:

the contest is intended for presentation in the united states, canada (except quebec province), mexico, india, china, the united kingdom, australia and new zealand. do not proceed within this site if you are not a resident of one of these countries.

(the lameness filter is lame)
No wonder the winners are from India.

Re:Another Attack on MS

[stratjakt]

Doubtful. Ingres is shit. MSSQL, for all your anti-MS whining, is actually a good product. It was good way back when it was a *NIX DB called Sybase SQL Server.

It's only insecure if you don't put a password on the sa (read admin/root) account. Which is the users perogative not to do so (I frequently don't on development systems, because I don't care), as well as the users fault if it gets exposed (as none of mine did since my whole dev environment is quarantined on it's own subnet).

One for Access

[bogaboga]

When will we have a DB conversion tool for MS-Access (read Microsoft's Jet engine)? Who will finance it any way? Slashdotters, this is a request to you to head over to http://koffice.org/kexi/ and contribute in any way you can. I do my part by the way. Kexi still has a pretty long way to go to catch up with Jet's scripting possibilities. We still have a challenge to attract all those VB programmers to the language kexi will use for scripting in the quest to add business logic to an application.

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.

seems like it would result in crappy code

[SCHecklerX]

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.

WTF is a mn?

[Sparr0]

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

Re:WTF is a mn?

[generic-man]

mn for million is British, commonly seen in the Financial Times (which also uses bn for billion). I imagine that it's a nod to the old British way of naming large numbers, which also included milliards (10^9) and billiards (10^15; a billion was 10^12).

In any case, it's struck a nerve even deeper than the accounting term "$1MM" for "one million," which apparently makes SI-loving geeks' heads explode.

I sure hope this doesn't serve as a model

[RhettLivingston]

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.

from tfa

[frieked]

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

From the original submitter

[alphakappa]

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.

Re:Topcoders vs CA Winners

[adbudha kusu]

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.

Re:Postgres

[dfetter]

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.

Re:Another Attack on MS

[hey!]

MSSQL, for all your anti-MS whining, is actually a good product.

Holy crap! A good product? Well, they have a nice management console, and a lot of features that were advanced for the days when it was the same product as Sybase.

On the other hand, I could eat a bowl of punch card dots and shit a better SQL parser. Try solving a tricky problem with some standard but slightly complex SQL and watch it blow up. Ever try using bound parameters in subqueries? Hah! Not to mention that the T-SQL dialect is full of all kinds of random and stupid limitations.

Re:What about the editors?

[sketerpot]

Sometimes they do. You just don't notice the non-typos.