News Review: CA make Ingres Open-Source
Is Open Source the graveyard of the once-mighty Ingres... or could it be a second life ?
Following lots of speculation on the tech forums, CA announced in May 2004 that it would Open-Source the Ingres database. As an Ingres user since version 6.3, this is a very interesting twist in a history of what was once one of the leading databases in the mid-range sector.
In 1994, Ingres could have potentially knocked Oracle off it's number 1 market position. Then CA came along, and many people felt that Ingres would slowly die. CA have since had an on- off- relationship with their new RDBMS, and it is generally felt that they have not marketed it as well as they could have done. On the other hand, they have increasingly started using it as an embedded solution in their own tools, such as Unicenter/TNG.
So why are they doing this ? And why now ? One of the clues to this could be in a news item posted by Jim Callaghan, the Computer Associates Product Manager for Ingres, who says:
" One of our main objectives is to protect out existing base and when we announced Ingres availability on 64bit Opteron, the prime aim was to ensure that existing users could make use of this technology. This gives them more choice and gives one less reason to switch to a competitor.
We did lose a number of users post-acquisition thanks to a lot of FUD from the competition, but here we are almost ten years since the ASK takeover and Ingres isn't dead. It's being actively developed and has been adopted internally at CA as the database of choice. Ingres has a long future.
Have we got back the market share we had in the early nineties? No.
Will we get it back? Not in the short term.
So what are we doing? Adapting to the changes in the marketplace (just like everyone else) and moving forward accordingly. "
In an article by Martin Banks in Application Development Advisor, Sam Greenblat of CA claimed that this would result in,
"the emergence of Ingres as the only fully functional, enterprise-ready open source RDBMS "
Implications
These quotes are all very well, but the real question that everyone wants answered is whether Ingres has a future. It is true that Ingres is a very scalable RDBMS, but why Open Source it ? Where is the business benefit ?
Part of the answer to these questions could be in the type of license.
When is Open-Source not Open-Source?
Not only is the Open Source community becoming a bit fragmented, but now we are seeing the rise of different versions of "Open-ness". The particular type of code license being suggested by CA is a Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL).
Although this licensing approach has not yet been approved by the Open Source Initiative, it is interesting, since it provides for something which other license types miss. With normal Open Source Licenses, there is no guarantee that someone else has not changed the code before passing it on to you. The idea of TOSL, as I understand it, is that the code comes with a CA signature, which means that it can only be changed with CA's direct approval. In short, this is not really a free license at all. It is basically allowing users to see the source code, but if they make any changes, these will have to be QAd by CA as well. So what is the point ?
My view is that CA could be playing a very smart game. By giving away the source code, they abrogate some support responsibility. They also get lots of air-time with IT Managers who only deploy Open Source. At the same time, by retaining some control, they have acknowledged that the very chaotic world of open-source is not to everyone's liking, and that some managers still want to have a measure of confidence that they can go back to a supplier, as a "single point of blame"
Not only that, but this type of license would work well for developers who want to embedd a database into their own application, and sell on the complete solution. Hence, also, the idea of a licensing agreement with the J2EE development tools supplier JBOS. The idea is very simple - you get the tools, build your application on top of them, and then sell on the entire solution as a single product. No multiple product licenses, no complex setup routines. Easy.
What of the future?
I think CA could be making a smart move. Ingres is a very scalable, high-performance relational database. Unlike MySQL, it has proved a competitor with Oracle in large systems for many, many years. With Linux moving into the mainstream, some IT managers are now looking not for megabytes, but for gigabytes of data on their Open-Source platforms. A 100 GB database is not really a problem for a properly configured Ingres environment.
So maybe the CA name will make it's way into the mindset of IT managers who hitherto have only been interested in running Apache and MySQL (or Mimer). If so, CA will have a marketing coup that other mainstream software vendors would give their right arm for.
And with Ingres being shipped as an embedded solution by loads of ISVs, CA will have their ear as well. And sometimes volume and presence counts for more that profits.
Final thought from an ex-employee of Quest Software
I wonder if Quest Software would be willing to Open-Source the Common Sense Computing Ingres toolset? Bearing in mind that these products were not wanted by Quest when they bought them, and that I/Analyst, I/DBA, I/AutoDBA could all be valuable tools for Enterprise-management of Ingres databases, maybe Quest could be persuaded to release what they don't want to the benefit of others.
Who knows, we might even see I/Watch in the Open-Source community ?? That way, we could have the monitoring and maintenance tools we need to support Ingres in the Enterprise.
Reviewed by Dennis Adams in July 2004