CA's Greenblatt Answers re Ingres $1 Million Bounty and Other Matters 128
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??????
#####
Those aren't his answers. (Score:2, Insightful)
And what did we expect? (Score:2)
It's been over a decade since I had anything to do with these guys. A company I worked for in the early 90s was to do some contract work for them. They were sleazy enough that our company decreed we would never deal with them again. I was not aware of any other company who drove us to such a decision.
Personally, I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could throw their Long Island building. Which was a pretty depressing place, too...
Re:Just curious... (Score:1)
Insights into the psychology of compulsive lying? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
He's not lying (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly it's
Re:He's not lying (Score:2, Insightful)
A manager, but a technical manager. That's why the questions were submitted to him instead of acting CEO Ken Cron. To maybe get some answers to questions from technologists from the technologist point of view.
We could have just read the CA website on our own if all we wanted was the standard promotional dreck.
KFG
Re:He's not lying (Score:2)
I think you are still on a completely different layer of the protocol stack from application architecture.
Re:He's not lying (Score:1)
And, quite frankly, his answers were subpar even for a sales brouchure.
I'll give him this though, the questions themselves were, for the most part, also subpar.
KFG
Re:He's not lying (Score:2)
Then you are in a different layer (and it's not the top in the metaphorical sense I think I clearly implied.)
He's answering questions as to why CA chose to open Ingres, and why they chose to allocate $1M to pay contributors.
Re:He's not lying (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:He's not lying (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that Ellison or Gates would have such difficulties.
This only requires some understanding of the likely needs of his customers. It's really not that technical.
Re:He's not lying (Score:2)
Re:He's not lying (Score:2)
Larry has room to "cheat" in this respect.
He could also have a subordinate do the appropriate research before handing himself to the wolves. One would hope that a CEO would do as much.
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:1)
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:2)
But then, since these aren't "business" advantages, maybe nobody heard of them except that particular lab...
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:3, Insightful)
He is merely saying that his product *will* be the next generation of blah blah blah.
He does not, at any point, say anything negative about PostgreSQL or MySQL. In fact, it is abundantly obvious that he is not interested in smearing these two products. He knows that his product will both directly compete with, as well as need to interoperate or exchange data with, these products.
I agree that he has not discussed any of the potential advantage
Give me a break (Score:2)
His answer:
Innovation! Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:2)
Since you're using a rather novel definition of "lying," maybe you ought to define "truth" for us so we'll know what the hell you're talking about.
These weird, angry rants are just one reason why the OSS community and Slashdot in particuarly are not taken very seriously by the wider business world. The guy offers up his time, answers some poorly-formulated and edited questions, and gets shat on.
It's pretty clear that nothing the guy said could have made people happy. Which, coincident
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, in Greenblatt's defense, my question was about 50% troll. But the latter part of my question, the proposal to drop Ingres in favor of developing postgresql, is a totally valid question, even if completely implausible. And the first part of the question could have been a real softball, setting him up to deliver a slam-dunk, naming a feature or two where Ingres really shines that the other open source databases don't offer. (I'm sure there are such features, even if they are overshadowed by Ingres's
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:1)
Re:Insights into the psychology of compulsive lyin (Score:1)
By Robert Westervelt, News Writer
19 Aug 2004 | SearchDatabase.com
Tyler McGraw, a database administrator at Bowater Inc., a paper maker in Greeneville, S.C., is finished making excuses for being an Ingres DBA.
McGraw, who is also works sometimes as an Oracle DBA, said he has often had trouble keeping up in conversations with other IT professionals at industry trade shows and conventions. Now, though, Computer Associates International Inc.'s decision to turn Ingres ove
Greenblatt not being unreasonable (Score:2)
Let's take a look at the questions.
Some of them were, frankly, insults, and the sort of thing that I'm embarassed to have coming from Slashdot.
Some of them attacked CA's tendency to "kill off" products. Well, for Chrissake, this guy just did the *exact opposite* -- he open sourced something so that it can be developed and used and maintained.
I mean, it sounds like CA has an awfully low degree of respect among the masses of IT people on this board -- and people were being pr
putting the record straight (Score:1)
We within CA greatly admire and respect the MySQL and PostgreSQL communities and believe that there's room for all three of us, and more, in the open source database arena which is probably why Sam didn't get into a feature function comparison here on Slashdot.
Ingres r3 provides support for:
Transactions;
Views;
Database procedures;
Rules;
Re:putting the record straight (Score:2)
Kinda boring.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked the point about CA being a graveyard for good products. I didn't realize that other people saw it like that... My perception of CA is that it's a lumbering giant among cutting edge powerhouses. By the time they get around to doing something like this [releasing Ingres as Open Source] they're too late. With so many open source database solutions out there, I doubt they'll offer anything special enough to really compete. So it turns into another candidate for their graveyard.
Re:Kinda boring.. (Score:3)
Did you like the part about it being a bullshit question with false premises?
The quality of the questions pretty much made the interview unsalvageable. The poor guy did as well as he could IMO.
Doublespeak and marketing blather. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
At first, Greenblatt says "Well, it depends on what you want you can't just compare them and say one is best". Then , in the next breath, "there will be no doubt
This is just a bone thrown to the opensource community. I predict, knowing the wisdom and capreciousnes of the opensource world, that Ingres will simply vanish, as MySQL and PostgresSQL continue their growth into enterprise-level applications
What!? (Score:5, Informative)
With respect, your paraphrase of the question is a little clueless - unless yor're playing devils advocate. Ten years ago, Ingres was one of the Big Four database management systems. The order was; Oracle, Ingres, Informix and Sybase. Ingres was owned by a Uk company, Ask Group, who hit financial difficulty just when Ingres was really taking off in a big way. The fire sale to CA quickly reveresed that trend, I suppose because of CAs reputation.
Ingres had , at the time , the rich feature set that Oracle, Sybase and Informix still have - stored procedures, tablespaces, rules and procedures, server clustering, multi-phase commit over several distributed server sites, out of the box failover facilities, a 4gl based forms environment etc etc.
MySQL and PostGres may be moving towards gaining these kind of enterprise grade facilities but, as far as I know, they're not there yet. They are undoubtedly widely accepted for the kinds of small to medium size developments - usually web projects, and they are both powerful enough for those types of projects. However, Ingres is far more on the Oracle kind of scale.
If I'm correct, I think PostGres may be a continuation of the original BSD licenced Ingres (hence POSTgres) I still see absolutely no reason to support Ingres,
Depends on exactly what CA are releasing into the wild.
nor do anything to support CA's policy of embrace and devour.
Agreed. Which is why, ten years down the line, Ingres is being hung out to dry.
Mod parent up please.... (Score:2)
Where are yesterday's mod points, now that I need them today?
hanzie.
Re:What!? (Score:2)
No? Oh, then we'de better not even look at the ingres code, otherwise they'll say we stole the stuff.
<joke>
1 patent lawyer thrown in the ocean: pollution.
1000 patent lawyers thrown in the ocean: solution.
</joke>
Fair Compensation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fair Compensation (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheers,
Erick
Re:Fair Compensation (Score:1)
Welcome to Open Source. If you left your job to go do F/OSS full time, you'd be doing the exact same thing as this anyway. There's NO guarantee that you'll make even a single penny off your work
Re:Fair Compensation (Score:4, Insightful)
And how is this different from any other OpenSource project?
The $1million is a bonus.
Re:Fair Compensation (Score:3, Interesting)
Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:1)
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like he was expecting to be interviewed by some dimwit from Forbes.
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:4, Funny)
That's what marketing people and managment are really good at - talking a whole lot but actually saying nothing at all. He wrote over 100 words in response to the postgres/mysql comparison questions, but didn't say a single meaningful thing. Are there classes in business school that teach this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:1)
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:2)
> this skill or something? "Empowering Best-of-Breed
> Verbally-Enabled E-Solutions 101"?
I've just come out of a meeting where the published agenda was "this is a critical initiative that requires contributions from all stakeholders to ensure that our department is able to work together effectively and efficiently, while delivering the quality that our customers expect".
That's the least useful description I've ever seen that didn't involve the phras
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:1)
If you want specific feature answers, why don't you try reading the respective manuals? Greenblatt's a Linux and Open Source strategist for CA, not an Ingres guru. Or, try asking your questions on th
Re:Totally avoiding the postgres ingres question (Score:2)
Here is the problem. I wasn't expecting an Ingres guru. I was interested in hearing what he had to say about the open source strategy of pushing Ingres out into the open source world (pun intended). In the end I was disappointed because I didn't hear anything
Ingres R3 benefits unclear (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear (Score:2)
I have long heard stories about the query optimizer being better than anything else out there; if there's only faint truth, it's still worth mentioning.
He certainly had a chance to mention any features he wanted to point out. That's a marketer's job, isn't it?
In the absence of that, and considering that there sure appear to be some, this suggests to me that Ingres
Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear (Score:2, Interesting)
nobody has been able to ever since CA grabbed it up and jammed their stupid licensing runtime on it. the best thing they could have done is open source the thing- now that it will run uninterrupted for a while we may be able to see what it can do.
for the unitiated, CA has a license file system that is somewhat based on the FLEX system, except it doesnt work (and therefore neither do the products).
Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear (Score:2)
I'm not sure about the current releases, but back around 6.3-6.4, Ingres had more features, tunability, and advanced concepts than Oracle, Sybase, or DB/2. It really was a nice database, and the people with their offices in California were pretty sharp.
The problem is that I can't imagine it having grown all that much since then. Once it got taken over by CA, it became a feature for supporting their business, which means it didn't get the focus on enhancements and capability growth that it might have ot
Re:Ingres R3 benefits unclear (Score:2)
Maybe I'm phrasing things a bit harshly. Most of the products CA supports and maintains would be abandonware if CA weren't willing to contract the support for business customers who need those products. Just because a product's market wasn't big enough to maintain long-term company viability doesn't mean the product was useless to the market share it did win.
I'll have to look into whether Ingres has full XA support and a cross-platform POSIX support base, but if it runs anywhere SuSE and RedHat do, as
Re:Long time Ingres experience (Score:1)
dodged my question (Score:3, Insightful)
"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."
So in other words, they're getting development done on the cheap. Which was the entire point of why I asked that question. Its kind of like when Slashdot had that contest for the tshirt design, and the prizes were really craptacular when you consider how much money Slashdot saved on hiring a graphic designer and how much money they'll make selling your product.
Unfortunately, 1 million is more than enough to lure in people.
Re:dodged my question (Score:1, Informative)
Though I agree that he completely dogdged your question. CA offers no reasons over why one should choose Ingres over Postgres and the community should reject the product and stick with building Postgres into a enterprise level database engine.
Re:dodged my question (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:dodged my question (Score:1)
They are making a product, which would normally cost a LOT more, which would normally require them to pay a LOT more people, and are instead giving one person a fraction of that (but still considerable for the individual) as a prize. I'm sorry, but when it comes to one person being rich, versus having many more tech people employed (which we should all be hoping for), I'm going with the latter.
Re:dodged my question (Score:2)
Some people are willing to work for free on OSS projects. Others are willing to exploit this in order to make a profit. There is nothing bad about it. RedHat (and other distro companies) are taking an OSS product and trying to make a buck from it. They aren't necessarily paying Linux programm
Re:dodged my question (Score:1)
What's wrong with that? It's not like they are forcing you (or anyone else) to buy their support contracts...
WTH (Score:1)
Michael Flatley? (Score:2)
Whats Michael Flatley got to do with it? Last time I checked he was busy tap dancing, not really trying to convince anyone of software products or belittle and community of geeks. I have got to say, you're worse than Luchiano Pavarotti [wikipedia.org]
Re:Michael Flatley? (Score:1)
Re:WTH (Score:1)
Title Change (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps even responds is too generous. How about "talks in PRspeak on subjects vaguely connected with the questions"?
Re:Title Change (Score:2)
Garbage in, garbage out.
Re:Title Change (Score:1)
No Information Here (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of these questions were answered (Score:5, Insightful)
The one answer that draws my attention though is the claim that the big million isn't for compensation of development efforts, but to alleviate constraints of financial hardship.
Come again? It's a contest. First you do development, perhaps under conditions of great financial hardship, then, after you do the work, maybe you win something to pay off the credit card bills you lived off of while doing the work.
It's not only compensation after the fact, it's very improbable compensation after the fact.
Tell ya what guys, if you really want me to work on the project while alleviating any financial hardship on my part fund the project with the million. Or at least just send me a case of rice noodles.
As it is this contest appears not to be either compensation or "alleviation", but rather a splashy offer in order to grab a lot of free headline space.
You can make up your own Dr. Evil joke about trying to make their million stand out against IBM's commitment of a billion.
KFG
Re:Some of these questions were answered (Score:2)
I believe they modeled their prize after the Nobel prize, which awards somewhere around 1M dollars. The whole point is not that people working in the field are hoping for the prize to cover their expenses, instead it is so that once someone is really good at what they do, and is willing to distribute their work for the good of humanity, they should be free of the constraints of money to continue their work after t
Re:Some of these questions were answered (Score:1)
I denigrated Greenblatt's characterization of the contest.
Your answer is much, much better and I find myself in general agreement with it, although in the case of the Nobel it is up to the researchers themselves to decide what to work on and not a specific given task.
It's not a contest I personally have much inte
Re:Some of these questions were answered (Score:2)
Which is all a big million-dollar contest is ever likely to be, when you think about it.
Re:Some of these questions were answered (Score:1)
Re:Planting the seed for sco style litigation late (Score:1)
SCO's litigation rests on the rather shakey ground that they own code by contractual obligation with IBM who actually wrote the code and that their own distribution of that code under the GPL doesn't count against th
Ingres to M$SQL (Score:4, Interesting)
Never mind that... (Score:1)
Microsoft just added the features particularly suited to it's environment... well there you go.
Re:What about PGP? (Score:4, Informative)
In simple terms
CA != NAI
PGP was brought by Network Associates Inc. (or is it Int.?) and not CA. NAI being the same people behind McAfee.
Re:What about PGP? (Score:2)
Re:What about PGP? (Score:2)
Disagree (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
So he's basically agreeing that AccPac died after they bought it.
CA's is just using this as a tax break for releasing the ingres database as open source software. And if CA could develop/test/release the conversion software it would cost more than $1 million. This is simply jus
Re:Disagree (Score:2)
Re:Disagree (Score:1)
Reminds me of The Onion (Score:1)
Clueless or Martetroid? (Score:2)
Especially where the claim that Ingres will be chosen because it "is the most functional and best database in the open source market today", but he cannot give even a single reason why this is so.
I assume this whole maneuver is spin applied from a neuvo-dinosaur, trying to prove it relevance in an increasingly
Re:Clueless or Martetroid? (Score:1)
The questions are the answers? (Score:1)
Opinion (Score:2)
>functional and robust database in the marketplace thus making Ingres the best choice.
Not being a database person, would those who know more than I agree that ingres is the
'the most functional and robust database in the marketplace' at open-source?
Ingres database has no value (Score:2)
By releasing it, they've shown how valueless it really is. To quote Tom Lane (whole post here [postgresql.org])
"If they thought they could still make a dime off it, they'd have kept it. Since they don't think they can, what is a rational assumption about the value of the code to the rest of us?"
I suspect they are hoping some free development will
Re:Ingres database has no value (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ingres database has no value (Score:2)
More info on ingres R3 Features (Score:1)
http://opensource.ca.com/projects/ingre
It seems (from the document) that it's a pretty powerful product. I would hope that they would take the time to set up at least the basis of a support community like IBM did with eclipse.
Ignore the $$$ (Score:2)
A large company, trying to understand and work with the open source community, takes a database that they have and use, and provide the source code. Developers can extend, improve, learn from (both good and bad) the lessons of other professional developers. Wouldn't you say that this is a good thing?
Now, they also provide up to 1 million dollars to fund an open source project to work on and learn from/about said code.
Last I checked, the code and the $$$ was a donation, a gift. I know C
Spot on (Score:2)
You had:
(a) People complaining about treatment of past software products, really pretty much ignoring Ingres. This has nothing to do with the stated topic of the interview.
(b) People complaining (now) that there is $1M involved. Come *on*. People hack on company-backed stuff for free, like MySQL or Evolution. If they want to give out money, fine. There's certainly no requirement to take any. You could donate it to the FSF.
(c) Demands for feature comparisons were,
Re:Ignore the $$$ (Score:1)
Ingress & OSS (Score:2)
Aslo - when we have a free shot at an CEO, let's start aksing questioins that they can answer. Why one DB over another isn't a good questioin. What do you see the impact of Ingress being open source on the DBMS market is a good questioin. CEOs
where are the answers? (Score:1)
Send back these questions and get some real answers this time.
Wow, there's something wrong with this guy (Score:2)
There's something vitally wrong with almost every answer. Let the flamage begin:
Why not? I can think of reasons you wouldn't, like the fact that so much software contains proprietary code which cannot be open-sourced. But just what's wrong with open-sourcing when you're done with something?
Re:ask slashdot (Score:2)
Re:ask slashdot (Score:1)
Re:ask slashdot (Score:2)
Re:ask slashdot (Score:1)
Re:bah (Score:5, Funny)