Computer Associates International made a major commitment to open-source software development on Monday, announcing a plan to make its Ingres database open source and outlining partnerships with other open-source projects like JBoss, Zope and Plone.
Computer Associates To Make Database Open Source
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It’s interesting that they chose the Common Public License. The CPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL (although GNU and FSF still consider it Free) because it contains requirements relating to patents that the GPL does not.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html.
One thing this does is limit the range of FOSS products that Ingres code can be included in.
I’ll be excited to dl it and give it a whirl.
When I was in college we used Sybase/4GL on SCO Unix (running on Compaq 486-SX @ 25Mhz with 8 MB of RAM :-). However, I remember our teacher speaking about Ingres a lot, he must have being a big fan and if it was in his hand probably he would have picked Ingres to teach us instead of Sybase.
Its a CPL derivate and it may or may not be GPL compatible. it is not likely to be a major issue. CPL has a similar share alike property to GPL.
This isn’t the Ingres he was talking about. Ingres was a research project at UC Berkeley that was one of the first RDBMS implementations (along with IBM’s System R). Several companies were created to commercialize the original BSD-licensed code.
Yes, I know that Ingres was Berkeley-derived but CA’s db has nothing to do with that BSD Ingres?
“”Computer Associates is releasing CA Advantage Ingres as Open Source under a variant of the Common Public License. The press release is here. This is a commercial fork of the public-domain University Ingres of the ’80’s, probably the first real relational database. CA’s product added SQL and in general brought the program up to enterprise quality. So has the PostgreSQL project. It will be interesting to see if there can be any synergies between the two products. The BSD licensing on PostgreSQL would allow it”
thats from bruce perens on slashdot
Firstly, CA Ingres is a lineal descendant of the Berkeley Ingres, and now it’s going back to its roots. Well done, CA. It’s good to see.
Secondly, this is going to put the screws on practically every other DBMS vendor out there. If CA pulls this off, this puts all other DBMS vendors at a disadvantage – CA Ingres is a commercial-level product after all, and now it’s Open Source it also raises the bar on all the previous Open Source DBMSes – they have to match its standards to compete.
Now imagine OpenOffice.org’s suite combined with CA Ingres-(FLOS) – the value of a certain office suite from a certain monopoly, just took a nose dive.
And PostgreSQL is direct descendant of Ingres: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres . I think it’s PostgreSQL success scared them.
“I think it’s PostgreSQL success scared them.”
not really. they have pretty good features over that of postgres. i just think CA wants to get into the act of open source proprietary stuff integration
Yes, I know that Ingres was Berkeley-derived but CA’s db has nothing to do with that BSD Ingres?
Berkeley Ingres (and Postgres) used to have their own relational query language. Supposedly it was better than SQL; but current In/Postgres derivatives dumped it because people were unwilling to learn it.
Berkeley Ingres (and Postgres) used to have their own relational query language. Supposedly it was better than SQL; but current In/Postgres derivatives dumped it because people were unwilling to learn it.
Yes, QUEL (I believe it was called) is one of the few implementations of a relational language that was at least somewhat approved by the Serious Thinkers of the relational model of data (C.J. Date, Hugh Darwen, etc…). SQL is a classic example of “design by committee”. It’s not so much that SQL doesn’t do the relational stuff (although it misses out on quite a bit of that), but that it does too much. It seemed like everyone had to have their say with SQL, to the point that it supports a ridiculous amount of redundant functionality, workarounds, even hacks, as well as violating the relational model in many ways. See “The Askew Wall” and other articles by Hugh Darwen at http://www.thethirdmanifesto.com, as well as the many rants by Fabian Pascal at http://www.dbdebunk.com .
I understand full well the realities of why Postgres and Ingres had to “go SQL”, but it is a shame we suffer from all the warts of this language, when so much more (and less 😉 ) is possible.
Can anyone sum up the features that Ingres is bringing to the table? How is it better than, say, SAP DB (which I haven’t) used?
Does it have better space management features than something like Postgres? Better backup and/or replication? Is it dramatically faster than Postgres?
Where is it used mostly? Back In The Day of selling back office accounting systems based on Informix, we almost never encountered Ingres in the marketplace, ususally fighting against Sybase and Oracle (and then later, SQL Server). Never saw them in the TCP-[A-D] benchmark wars, etc. So, they were obviously courting some other market segment.
Do we get all of the documentation and a reasonably simple build procedure as well?
“I’ve been pretty impressed with CA’s aggressiveness in going after open source,” said Bob Bickel, vice president of corporate development and strategy at JBoss. “I think they’ve done their homework pretty well.”
These guys make me laugh. CA will partner with the Zope and Plone people, but they’re not going after them. What are CA going to do? Perform a hostile takeover of Zope and Plone and own everything? Ha, ha, ha (Dr. Evil finger impression).
Just shows that getting venture capital investment can make you lose the last marble you had.