Computer Associates International made a major commitment to open-source
software development on Monday, announcing a plan to "open" its Ingres database
and outlining partnerships with other open-source projects.
The management software company said that in 90 days, it will make the source
code for its Ingres database on Linux available for download. Computer
Associates will also offer an open-source license called the CA Trusted Open
Source License (CA-TOSL). The new license, which Computer Associates expects
will gain certification from the Open
Source Initiative, will provide the legal protections demanded by corporate
customers, CA executives said.
"There are a couple of challenges for CIOs from commercial companies from
using open source. First is having a trusted lineage of the source code, and
second is (legal) indemnification," said Mark Barrenechea, CA's senior vice
president of product development. The CA-TOSL license is derived from the
existing Common
Public License.
Computer Associates also outlined plans to collaborate with existing
open-source projects and the software they create, including Java server
software from JBoss,
the Zope
Web content management system, and the Plone
document management software.
In another effort to boost its participation in open-source projects,
Computer Associates has contributed software called Kernel Generalized Event
Model to the Linux development process. The software, which the company hopes
will be incorporated into the Linux operating system kernel in the next few
months, is designed to improve the security of Linux and to feed performance
information from Linux systems to management systems.
Overall, Computer Associates' goal is to tap into the broad open-source
development community and create a "stack" of open-source software tuned
specifically for management, Barrenenchea said.
"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."
Computer Associates and JBoss have penned an agreement to optimize the Ingres
database to work with Hibernate, a JBoss-run project that creates software for
feeding data from relational databases to Java applications. CA will distribute
the Hibernate software along with JBoss' software and offer commercial support
licenses for the software package.
Computer Associates intends to create closer ties with the newly created
Plone Foundation and Zope open-source project. The company intends to optimize
its management software for both products, said Sam Greenblatt, senior vice
president and chief architect of CA's Linux technology group.
Computer Associates' BrightStor
storage management product, BrightStor Document Manager, will use the Plone
document management software, and CA will contribute code and people to the
Plone project. Similarly, Computer Associates will create closer integration
between the Zope content management software and its Ingres database.
The decision to make its Ingres database open-source will benefit the company
overall, said Andrew
Schroepfer, president and founder of Tier 1 Research. The Ingres database
has relatively small market share and, compared to other products, Ingres has
not benefited from a large amount of development resources at Computer
Associates.
"While CA may be giving up revenue from their Ingres customers, they can make
it up (by) cross-selling to customers who want to go more into open source,"
Schroepfer said. "It's a net positive."
The open-source version of Ingres on Linux will join a number of other
open-source databases now available, such as MySQL
and PostgreSQL.
Most likely, the Ingres open-source database will appeal primarily to Computer
Associates' existing customers, Bickel said.
By making the Ingres database open-source, Computer Associates hopes to add
more features through volunteer programmers while reducing the cost of its own
management software products, which run on the Ingres database, company
executives said.
As part of its plans to make an open-source project around Ingres, CA said it
has beefed up the database clustering features. The company has created closer
technical integration with Oracle
Cluster File System and IBM's
Distributed Lock Manager for clustered Linux servers.
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