Computer Associates International Inc. will turn to open-source software developers to help businesses migrate to its Ingres relational database software, it said Wednesday.
The Islandia, N.Y., company announced a US$1 million challenge to encourage development of an open source database migration toolkit. Programmers within the open source community will be offered the US$1 million bounty to develop tools to help businesses using other databases switch to Ingres, a company spokesperson said. He could not say which competing databases CA would target.
This is not the first time CA has turned to the open source movement to boost Ingres. In May it announced plans to open up the source code to the database under the CA Trusted Open Source License, allowing independent software vendors to incorporate Ingres into their products as long as they provide their customers with the Ingres source code.
CA is not alone in seeking help from open source developers to breathe new life into database products. On Tuesday IBM Corp. donated “Derby,” a copy of its Java-based Cloudscape relational database, to the Apache Software Foundation, to be managed as an open-source project.
CA will give further details of the challenge at the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco later Wednesday.
