CA’s Ingres to venture into open source

LAS VEGAS: Computer Associates (CA) plans to release Ingres enterprise relational database for Linux into the open source community. Ingres will be made available at http://ca.com/opensource within the next 90 days. This move is being projected by CA as its renewed commitment to open source and simultaneously announced the creation of CA Trusted Open Source License (CA-TOSL) which itself is a derivative of the common public license that will be available at www.opensource.com. The word "trusted" in CA-TOSL is explained as bringing respect, indemnification, support, maintenance and enhancement for the open source movement.

It maybe recalled that CA acquired Ingres in a strategic move to enter the lucrative database market. The acquisition failed for CA to make any impact in the database market. Hence the decision to allow its database software in to open source comes as a positive sign as it expects further development on Ingres from the open source community. "The existing users of Ingres will get more features with this move. It will be a net positive for our customers," said Mark Barrenechea, Senior Vice President of Product Development of CA.

Under CA-TOSL, third party open source ISVs can incorporate Ingres into their product lines as long as the source code is provided with the product. CA will offer support and indemnification as added cost options to the CA-TOSL Ingres. Experts believe that the ability of Ingres to integrate with other applications and data in a heterogeneous environment makes it well suited for use as an embedded technology in applications and solutions developed by ISVs.

"The release of Ingres underscores CA's commitment to our customers, partners, to open source and to the database itself. The combined R&D of CA and the open source community will bring tremendous value to database users around the world," said Tony Gaughan, Senior Vice President of Product Development of CA. Over the last couple of years, open source has been gaining ground amongst corporate users. They are now demanding enterprise class quality, functionality and support for these solutions. With the release of Ingres, CA hopes to leverage the power of the open source community.

CA also plans to partner with JBoss to create advanced open source solution for Java and to work with Zope to bring open source content management to mainstream enterprise market.

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