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Ingres goes open-source

Martin LaMonica CNET News.com

Published: 01 Nov 2004 17:34 GMT

Computer Associates International on Monday kicked off its entry into open-source software with the release of its Ingres r3 database.

The company said that Ingres r3 for Linux and Windows is available under an open-source licence called CA Trusted Open Source License. The licence allows others to view the source code of the database, download the software for free, and incorporate it into other software bundles that are licensed under CA's open-source licence.

In conjunction with the release of Ingres r3, CA launched four paid support offerings around the database that offer legal indemnification. Customers will pay for ongoing support services, rather than a commercial software licence, to use the database.

CA's decision to sponsor an open-source project around its Ingres database -- a product with over 15,000 customers -- is the cornerstone of the company's open-source strategy. The company is looking to revive usage of Ingres, which has minimal market share, and develop services offerings around other open-source products.

CA said that the features of Ingres r3 compete with well-established commercial products from Oracle and other database providers. Ingres r3 includes clustering software to prevent system failures and has "scalable" clustering software designed to let customers pool together many low-cost servers for more processing muscle.

As part of its open-source push, CA has pledged to spend $1m in a contest to entice developers to create so-called database migration tools to ease the task of converting for Ingres r3 the programs that run on commercial databases from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase.

The multibillion-dollar database market is seeing a growing influence from open source. Revenue at database company MySQL is growing rapidly, according to the company. IBM created an open-source project called Derby around its specialized Cloudscape database earlier this year, and Sybase is allowing customers to deploy a Linux version of its database for free.

By early next year, CA intends to have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ingres r3 available for Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, HP Tru64 and OpenVMS. Local language versions for French, German and Japanese are slated for release later this year.

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