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.
>
>
Maybe there is a technical angle to many developers' disapproval (even
though it doesn't seem to be voiced directly). My current company uses
Postgres exclusively. Two companies ago, my company used Postgres
almost exclusively. OTOH, I am not interested in Postgres-specific
tools. Only tools that can help people migrate-to-and-away-from Ingres
(or any other database) are interesting to me. Statements like 'we want
tools to help people migrate to Ingres', stink of closed-source attempts
to achieve vendor lock-in.
For Ingres to become popular, I would suggest that it needs top-notch,
verified support in: PHP (4 and 5), JDBC, UnixODBC, OpenOffice, Python,
Perl, and misc tools (datavision, datastudio, etc). Perhaps Ingres has
all of these (I don't know), but CA might be better off trumpeting to
the community, "Look, we play nice with others on an equal footing and
are not looking to gain proprietary advantage." And yes, switching to
the GPL couldn't hurt.
--ronan
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