CA Turns To Open SourceCA Turns To Open Source

Computer Associates has expanded its relationship with the open-source development community with the release this week of its Ingres enterprise relational database for collaborative use.

"This is more than a commitment to open source; it's jumping in with both feet," says James Geronaitis, VP of product marketing and brand operations for CA. The vendor has received the commitment of about 2,000 open-source developers to look at the Ingres code and create enhancements, he adds.

"You never know what they are going to come up with," Geronaitis says. "They're getting their favorite database back. With this, CA continues to be the leader by far in the open-source community."

CA has created the Trusted Open Source License, a derivative of the common public license that will be available from opensource.org. The company says it's releasing Ingres to foster innovation and encourage developers and application vendors to utilize the database.

Under terms of the release, software vendors can incorporate Ingres into their products as long as the Ingres source code is provisioned with the product. CA will offer support and indemnification as added-cost options.

Ingres will be made available at CA's Web site within the next 90 days. Contributors will be able to submit modifications to the project at the site.

In addition, CA and JBoss Inc. unveiled plans to create open-source software for Java. The project combines JBoss Application Server, JBoss Hibernate object-relational query service, and Ingres to provide a platform to build Java 2 Enterprise Edition and other Java applications.

CA and Zope Corp. also disclosed plans to provide customers with open-source content-management programs that are compatible with relational database technology. The companies are expected to disclose availability of a persistence engine by year's end.