RE: [SLUG] Question for SLUG (CA, Ingres and Open Source)

From: Ken Elliott (kelliott4@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Tue Aug 10 2004 - 19:44:26 EDT


Hello David,

I think some of this is just a bad signal-to-noise ratio. Some not.

If I ask you to donate 8 hours to teach kids, you might be honored. If I
offered to pay you $2/hr for the same work, you might feel insulted. So I
suspect some of the noise is from professionals who have donated their
efforts for "the good cause" of open source, being offered an amount of
money below what they believe (or would like to believe) their work is
worth.

I believe part of what you are seeing is due to CA being a large
corporation. CA has a duty to enrich their stockholders. The open
source/open system movement seeks to enrich humanity and advance state of
the art. Certainly, these don't have to be at odds, but in practice usually
are.

There are certainly those in the open systems movement that are quite vocal.
Many enjoy taking shots at large corporations, some that have stood in the
way of open systems, or cooped them for their own agenda. So, I suspect CA
has to get those folks to warm up to them a bit, rather than show up to the
party, throwing money around.

These things come across as fishy:

Rather than release Ingres under GPL (or one of the well-known licenses), CA
chose to release it under the Computer Associates Trusted Open Source
License. This is a license that is unknown to many of us and is a bit like
writing your own version of the bible to many. Now, I'm not saying there's
anything wrong with it, but it's yet another license to review. CA paid
money to develop this license. Why?

>From http://www3.ca.com/Files/SupportingPieces/ingres_challenge_tc2.pdf,
6.3.3 "outline the business potential of the Program Entry" suggests you are
using the open source community as a source of code that would allow you to
generate revenue. That might be fine and good, but since CA didn't release
under GPL, it suggests some other motive.

MySQL is a darling of the OS movement. It would appear that you wish to
compete with MySQL, and that will not go over well with many. MySQL isn't
GPL, but they have proven to be true to the OS spirit. We like to support
these folks, so CA comes across as WalMart moving in next to Uncle Bob's
Hardware Store.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Most open source guys have been burned
by closed "solutions" from corporations who made a sale, then began to gouge
us. Microsoft is taking a lot of heat for this lately, but all the
copy-protection systems, poor-quality code, security issues and attempts to
force upgrade have left a bad taste in our mouths. We are a community of
skeptics who don't take everything at face value.

It takes time to build trust in the open source community, and it comes
across to some that you guys are trying to rush it. I like the idea that
you guys are willing to invest money in this, but you shouldn't expect it to
come across well to all. It's like offering a bounty against a popular
outlaw. Some will like your efforts to bring piece, some will dislike you
for offering blood money, and a few guys need the cash.

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised you didn't see this coming.

Ken Elliott

=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of Meyer, David R
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 1:11 PM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: [SLUG] Question for SLUG (CA, Ingres and Open Source)

 
Good Afternoon,

I need to ask the group about something I don't understand, and I am hoping
that you can shed some light on it for me.

At Linux World last week CA announced a million-dollar challenge to the Open
Source community basically stating that we'd give cash awards (of up to
$400,000.00 - total $1,000.000.00 purse) for the best conversion utilities
that were created for migrating from various databases to the newly Open
Sourced Ingres v3.0.

I thought that the Open Source community would welcome that move, but
instead we've been trashed. Everything from "a million dollars is a
pittance" to "did you notice that only a very select few countries are
invited" followed by a few more less than kind remarks.

So...here is what I don't understand, and what I am asking you help in
understanding is why it seems the Open Source community is being so hard on
CA? We are funding several Open Source projects, we've Open Sourced our
Ingres DB, and we're offering up a total purse of one million bucks to those
who write and submit database conversion tools from XXX to Ingres.

>From my perspective, these are all good things. However, it appears as
either I have totally missed something here, or I just happen to be seeing
the worst of the comments.

Any help in understanding this would be appreciated.

Dave

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