Moving from Closed to Open
Here's the story of how Ingres transitioned its product to an open source success.
By Emma McGrattan, Ingres
Dec. 01, 2008
Open source projects typically start life in one of two ways. They can be born of the open source development community and grow organically in open source. Examples of this include Apache Tomcat, PostgreSQL, and Linux. Or they can start life as a closed source product that is contributed to the open source community at some point during its life cycle, such as Eclipse, Apache Derby, and Ingres.
The story of how Ingres prepared for its contribution to the open source community, tells one company's successful process and touches on some of the lessons learned along the way.
Ingres' Open Source Roots
The original INGRES project, founded at UC Berkeley in the 1970s and funded in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Navy Electronic Systems Command, was the foundation on which a number of commercially successful relational database solutions - Ingres, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server were built. Developed as an open source solution under the Berkeley license, the original University INGRES is still in existence today.
The commercial branch of the University INGRES project, which was also called Ingres, was acquired by Computer Associates (CA) in 1994. As well as having its own users, Ingres was also provided to CA customers as the embedded database within CA's infrastructure management product lines including Unicenter, BrightStor and eTrust.
In mid-2004, following a period of significant investment in the development of the Ingres technology, CA decided to contribute Ingres to the open source community in an effort to speed up the pace of innovation. CA also wanted to leverage the open source development model to respond to customer needs more rapidly and effectively by engaging customers in the process from design through delivery. At that time MySQL and PostgreSQL had proven there was a demand for an open source, lower cost alternative to Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and so forth, but neither product had the feature set required for mission critical, enterprise deployment, nor did they have the ability to provide 24x7 support.
Ingres was different. It had proven itself in mission critical deployments for over a decade, and had a global support team that understood what it took to provide round-the-clock support to the enterprise where a minute of downtime can equal losses in millions of dollars.
Tracing Every Line of Code
Before a project can be contributed to the open source community, one must first understand the Intellectual Property (IP) ownership and provenance of every line of code. In 2004 the notorious "SCO Suits" were raging, and it was important to us to be able to provide indemnification, an insurance against IP infringement issues, to our customers. The Ingres team used a combination of automated tools, as well as a visual inspection of the code to ensure that the origins of every one of the millions of lines of source code were clearly understood. We performed an additional scan of the code to ensure that no customer names were inadvertently divulged in the code, and that any inappropriate comments were removed.
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The story of how Ingres prepared for its contribution to the open source community, tells one company's successful process and touches on some of the lessons learned along the way.
Ingres' Open Source Roots
The original INGRES project, founded at UC Berkeley in the 1970s and funded in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, and the Navy Electronic Systems Command, was the foundation on which a number of commercially successful relational database solutions - Ingres, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server were built. Developed as an open source solution under the Berkeley license, the original University INGRES is still in existence today.
The commercial branch of the University INGRES project, which was also called Ingres, was acquired by Computer Associates (CA) in 1994. As well as having its own users, Ingres was also provided to CA customers as the embedded database within CA's infrastructure management product lines including Unicenter, BrightStor and eTrust.
In mid-2004, following a period of significant investment in the development of the Ingres technology, CA decided to contribute Ingres to the open source community in an effort to speed up the pace of innovation. CA also wanted to leverage the open source development model to respond to customer needs more rapidly and effectively by engaging customers in the process from design through delivery. At that time MySQL and PostgreSQL had proven there was a demand for an open source, lower cost alternative to Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and so forth, but neither product had the feature set required for mission critical, enterprise deployment, nor did they have the ability to provide 24x7 support.
Ingres was different. It had proven itself in mission critical deployments for over a decade, and had a global support team that understood what it took to provide round-the-clock support to the enterprise where a minute of downtime can equal losses in millions of dollars.
Tracing Every Line of Code
Before a project can be contributed to the open source community, one must first understand the Intellectual Property (IP) ownership and provenance of every line of code. In 2004 the notorious "SCO Suits" were raging, and it was important to us to be able to provide indemnification, an insurance against IP infringement issues, to our customers. The Ingres team used a combination of automated tools, as well as a visual inspection of the code to ensure that the origins of every one of the millions of lines of source code were clearly understood. We performed an additional scan of the code to ensure that no customer names were inadvertently divulged in the code, and that any inappropriate comments were removed.
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