Computer Associates adopts Linux for Ingres database

By ADAM GIFFORD





Computer Associates is to go open-source with its Ingres relational database, putting a formidable weapon in the hands of those taking Linux to the business datacentre market.

The announcement, at the CA World user conference in Las Vegas, came the same week as a frenzied attack on Linux from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a Microsoft-funded right-wing think tank, and shows the deepening rift between Microsoft and other industry giants.

It came as CA tried to move on from the illegal revenue-smoothing practices of four or five years ago which led to a massive cull of its senior executive team, including the demotion of chief executive Sanjay Kumar last month.

Chief technology officer Yogesh Gupta said that in the past two years the company had filed more patents than its total over the first 25 years, and in storage management it had filed three times as many as main rival Veritas.

He said businesses expected an IT environment which gave them flexibility and high levels of service with an always-on infrastructure so IT became invisible.

That created challenges for chief information officers, who had to manage increased complexity within fixed or falling budgets.

"Five years ago you didn't have to deal with Linux ... you didn't have to deal with handheld devices ... wireless connectivity, etc, etc. Complexity continues to grow," Gupta said.

CA makes software to manage and secure computer systems and storage.

Ingres is a database it bought a decade ago, and while it has maintained it and bundled it up with its own products, it has not had the market attention given to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

It was more popular in Australia and New Zealand, where it was incorporated into many manufacturing and distribution systems, so news of its revival should hearten CIOs under pressure to move database platforms.

Sam Greenblatt, CA's Linux technology group chief architect, refused to say how much revenue the company was getting from Ingres, but said CA "is committed to setting up in the bazaar", referring to an influential article by Eric Raymond which described the closed development model of proprietary software companies as a "cathedral" versus the bazaar of open source.

"When we have 25 developers on a product, by making it open source, all of a sudden we get 250 developers," Greenblatt said.

"If we feel the open source community can help us enhance the product, it is much better on a cost basis to let the community work on it, as long as the intellectual property rights are granted back to the owner of the project."

CA has created a new licence for Ingres which gives it ultimate control over what goes into the product. It also means CA can guarantee trusted lineage of the source code and offer indemnification for customers using it - which should go a long way to overcoming the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) generated by the likes of the de Tocqueville attack, which wrongly claimed Linux instigator Linus Torvalds stole code from earlier operating systems.

Ingres will support the Oracle Cluster File System and IBM's Open Distributed Lock Manager, allowing customer to build large, reliable clusters cheaply and perhaps undermining Oracle and IBM's plans to also make money off the back of Linux.

Greenblatt said CA was working hard to convince open-source advocates it was not the "evil empire".

"We are funding open source mainly to enable the enhancement of the product so we can do add-ons. I am not looking to take their code and run with it." Those products include BrightStor storage management, eTrust security and the company's flagship Unicenter system management tools.

Greenblatt said participation in open source by companies like CA, IBM and Oracle could help overcome weakness in the open-source model of relying on the enthusiasm of volunteer programmers.

CA has submitted a technology called Kernel Generalised Event Mode (KGEM) for incorporation into the Linux kernel. Greenblatt said it would give system administrators much greater control of their environment.

"At the moment, to manage Linux you have to put a hook into the kernel. Modifying the kernel of the operating system is not easy because while you are modifying the OS, so is the community, they are making patches and changes, and every so often your hook won't work any more because someone has come in and stepped on it."

CA has also worked with the Plone Foundation to create a new BrightStor Document Manager product which combines the open source Plone document management engine with BrightStor Portal.

It is also partnering with Zope, an open-source web application server, and JBoss, which makes a J2EE application server.

CA says it is refining its message and reducing the number of products it offers, to focus on software that manages other software.

* Adam Gifford went to CA World Las Vegas as a guest of CA.