Computer Associates International, Inc. today announced the Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, an unprecedented offer to the open source community to develop migration toolkits for Ingres r3, which was released today under the CA Trusted Open Source License.
The offer – which is unique in the history of the open source community – is designed to leverage the global developer talent pool, while providing substantial financial compensation to those who successfully meet the challenge.
Under the terms of the offer, open source developers are invited to create solutions that enable users of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Informix and/or MySQL to migrate to the Ingres r3 database platform. Qualifying solutions will be eligible for cash awards of up to $400,000, with a total purse of $1 million.
“CA’s Ingres Million Dollar Challenge underscores our commitment to creating an optimal working relationship between ourselves and the open source community,” said Mark Barrenechea, executive vice president of product development at CA. “This relationship benefits CA and our customers by allowing us to leverage the cumulative talent of the community, while generating significant opportunities for open source developers around the world.”
Open source technology has become increasingly appealing to organizations seeking to lower total cost of ownership while taking advantage of the accelerated innovation provided by the open source community. These advantages are particularly attractive in the database space, where proprietary solutions can add significant cost to business solutions and greatly limit the ability of IT to respond to changing requirements.
Because it combines open source licensing, advanced features and enterprise-class scalability, Ingres is a particularly compelling alternative to proprietary database platforms. By creating appropriate migration tools, the open source community can help more organizations take advantage of the benefits Ingres has to offer – while at the same time promoting the transition from proprietary to open source technology.
CA announced the offer at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. The offer begins August 5, 2004, and submissions will be accepted until February 1, 2005. Six winners will be announced at caworld, CA’s annual user conference, April 17 – 21, 2005 in Orlando, Florida.
“Ingres r3 offers a highly scalable, feature-rich open source database platform that can much more readily be adapted to specific business requirements than proprietary alternatives,” said Barrenechea. “By crafting appropriate migration tools, the open source community will be enabling organizations all over the world to take advantage of its unique and compelling attributes.”
The challenge is open only to individuals who on the date of their submission of an entry are Open Source Community Members, of legal age, and are legal residents of, and are physically located within the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, Canada (except Quebec Province), Mexico, United Kingdom, India, China, Australia and New Zealand. Full details of The Challenge eligibility and the official rules are available at http://ca.com/ingres/challenge.
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