On Tue, Aug 10, 2004 at 01:10:57PM -0400, Meyer, David R wrote:
>
> 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
I can't speak for the whole Open Source community. Just consider my
opinion to be worth what you're paying for it. (Check's in the mail,
right? ;-)
You open sourced Ingres, which has a tiny sliver of the database market
(my opinion). That's a Good Thing(tm). You're paying people to develop
migration tools because otherwise people who have access to PostgreSQL,
MySQL, Oracle or DB2 might otherwise just ignore the whole thing (my
opinion). You also hope this will ingratiate you to the Open Source
community (my opinion) and spread the word about Ingres (my opinion). CA
isn't looked upon all that favorably anyway, because they've built their
success by gobbling up other companies and rebranding their products (my
opinion, and possibly untrue), then charging a lot for them (opinion,
also possibly untrue). The Open Source community has a lot of zealots in
it, and no matter what you do, those people aren't going to be happy
about it. The press, like sharks in the water, pounce on anything that
looks like conflict and turn it into WWIII. As for your other Open
Source projects, I never heard about this. Maybe that means no one else
has either.
If you're paying people to come up with migration tools that you will
then make closed source, prepare for another drubbing. If you're going
to open source the migration tools, that's another Good Thing(tm).
Neither $1M nor $400k is a pittance to anyone who isn't Donald Trump.
Does it matter what countries are "invited"? I can't imagine how
(opinion).
I don't really much care about whether CA is a good company or a bad
company. I don't even really care much about Ingres. But if they open
source one or more of their products, and then pay people to produce
Open Source migration products, I'm all for it. If it gets them some
currency in the Open Source community, all I can say is, "Spend it
wisely."
Microsoft tries this by saying things like, "Yes, we're going
to use open source Kerberos for our security." Then promptly perverts
the standard. Or, "We're going to use XML for our data interchange
format." Then promptly embeds binary data in it. Open Source geeks are
naturally leery of large corporations with stockholders, and when you
factor in the large bend-over constant they've had to deal with, you can
imagine their skepticism.
I'd say, "Turn the other cheek." (Oh wait, not the lower one, the upper
one! ;-)
Paul
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