[Info-Ingres] Ingres: An Open Source Rival to Oracle

FYI
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thre...s_an_open.html
--
Jean-Pierre Zuate
La Fage Conseil
+33(0)6 11 40 11 09
jean-pierre.zuate@lafageconseil.fr
http://lafageconseil.fr/

On 2009-06-25, Jean-Pierre Zuate, La Fage Conseil <jean-pierre.zuate@lafageconseil.fr> wrote:
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> FYI
> http://www.businessweek.com/the_thre...s_an_open.html

I think Ingres is a pretty good database, but I really, really wish
people would stop calling it "open-source commercial". There's an open
source version, and a commercial version, but calling it "open-source
commercial" is just marketing spin. Good luck using the open-source
variant in a commercial setting. The entirety of the open-source version
of Ingres is covered by the GPL, including the connection libs, which
means the open-source version can *only* be used with GPL software;
any other license, proprietary *or* non-GPL open-source cannot. I was
bitten by the IPL-to-GPL license transition just as we were going to go
live on Ingres, with a support contract and all, and the response from
Ingres Corp boiled down to "sucks to be you", and all this just weeks
after I was interviewed by a national techno-rag extolling Ingres Open
Sources' virtues. Count me bitter on that aspect.

Open source is usually touted for two main reasons -- greater control
of your own destiny, and cost. Greater control is a total farce in the
open-source database realm; database tech is much deeper voodoo than
most people think it is, so if your core-business isn't already
databases, you really have very little use for the source code in the
sense that you might want to go at it alone. If the main driver is
cost, there's plenty databases to choose from depending on your needs
(Oracle lite or whatever they call it, SQL Server Express, PostgreSQL,
Firebird, or, god forbid, MySQL) that won't impose the GPL on your
product.

So please, do pick Ingres because it suits your needs at a lower price
point than Oracle, or because you like their support[*], both excellent
reasons to choose Ingres. Don't pick it because they let you peek at
the source.



[*] Ingres Support was extremely helpful all the way through the extremely
good an the extremely bad times I've had with Ingres Corp. I rate Ingres
support to be one of the best, strike that, plainly the best I've ever had
for any tech product. You guys rock. But what passed for your management
around that time sucked. First against the wall when the revolution
comes.

--
Emiliano

Emiliano wrote:

> On 2009-06-25, Jean-Pierre Zuate, La Fage Conseil <jean-pierre.zuate@lafageconseil.fr> wrote:
>> --001636c5a57b4fb951046d285c36
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>
>> FYI
>> http://www.businessweek.com/the_thre...s_an_open.html

[snip]
> Good luck using the open-source
> variant in a commercial setting.

Using the community version of *any* open source software in
a commercial setting (or more precicesly, in a "business critical"
setting) would be reckless. The community version of Ingres is
at least as usable as the community version of anything else.

> The entirety of the open-source version
> of Ingres is covered by the GPL, including the connection libs, which
> means the open-source version can *only* be used with GPL software;
> any other license, proprietary *or* non-GPL open-source cannot.

"Used with" is vague here. What you mean is "linked with".
I can perfectly well run the open source version of Ingres on MS
Windows at work and a home.

But more importantly, no limitations of any kind arise unless you intend
to distribute your software. So there is no limitation on what you do
during development and there is no limitation on what you do "in-house".
You only get into trouble when you want to distribute your software. At
that point you need to license the commercial version or GPL your own
software (which of course has to be capable of being GPL'd).

> I was
> bitten by the IPL-to-GPL license transition just as we were going to go
> live on Ingres, with a support contract and all, and the response from
> Ingres Corp boiled down to "sucks to be you", and all this just weeks
> after I was interviewed by a national techno-rag extolling Ingres Open
> Sources' virtues. Count me bitter on that aspect.

You would not be the first person to be bitten in that way, and back
then I would definitely have been bitten too. But knowing what we know
now it it is obvious that the Free Software Foundation intends us to
be prevented from developing proprietary software using GPL'd
components. That is the whole point of the GPL. That is also why dual
licensing is common practice. Us being naive about that is not a
problem with the licence.

> Open source is usually touted for two main reasons -- greater control
> of your own destiny, and cost.

People can propose any benefit of using open source that they like. It
doesn't mean they are right and it doesn't mean they are relevant.
Control of your destiny was never plausible. The first time I looked at
the GPL code for an RS232 to Ethernet concentrator I was using almost 20
years ago I realized I didn't have time in my busy day to be messing
with that. A more plausible advantage of open source is that it is a
kind of public escrow, so you can have a bit more comfort trying
something new from a smaller vendor.

Just out of curiosity, back when you were getting bitten was there a
really good reason why your employer could not have GPL'd the software
you were working on? Was there a problem with a cocktail of
incompatible licenses, or were there other legitimate proprietary
obstructions? Or was it just an automatic aversion to disclosing your
source code? As you say, getting to peek at the code doesn't really
get anyone anywhere.

> Greater control is a total farce in the
> open-source database realm; database tech is much deeper voodoo than
> most people think it is, so if your core-business isn't already
> databases, you really have very little use for the source code in the
> sense that you might want to go at it alone.

Totally agree.

> If the main driver is
> cost, there's plenty databases to choose from depending on your needs
> (Oracle lite or whatever they call it, SQL Server Express, PostgreSQL,
> Firebird, or, god forbid, MySQL) that won't impose the GPL on your
> product.

True; there is a DBMS to suit every need. Even today Ingres suits some
needs that the others don't--mostly in business critical situations--and
based on what Bill Maimone was saying at the IUA conference, Ingres is
poised to suit even more needs soon.

> So please, do pick Ingres because it suits your needs at a lower price
> point than Oracle, or because you like their support[*], both excellent
> reasons to choose Ingres. Don't pick it because they let you peek at
> the source.

Very sage advice. I agree completely.

>[*] Ingres Support was extremely helpful all the way through the extremely
> good an the extremely bad times I've had with Ingres Corp. I rate Ingres
> support to be one of the best, strike that, plainly the best I've ever had
> for any tech product. You guys rock.

I completely agree with this too.

> But what passed for your management
> around that time sucked. First against the wall when the revolution
> comes.

No, that is harsh. They did do a very poor job of educating us about
what open source and CA-TOSL meant, and they repeated the error when
they adopted GPL. I was on the conference call the day before it was
announced that Ingres was being open sourced and we were all
*bitterly* opposed to the idea. It turns out we had no idea what we
were being told. We were naive and mis-informed. We jumped to a lot of
wrong conclusions. There was plenty of blame to go around.

--
Roy

UK Ingres User Association Conference 2010 will be on Tuesday June 8 2010
Go to http://www.iua.org.uk/join to get on the mailing list.

Hello Roy,

On 2009-06-29, Roy Hann <specially@processed.almost.meat> wrote:
>> Good luck using the open-source
>> variant in a commercial setting.
>
> Using the community version of *any* open source software in
> a commercial setting (or more precicesly, in a "business critical"
> setting) would be reckless. The community version of Ingres is
> at least as usable as the community version of anything else.

In the sense that you can tinker with it, yes. But the
open-source-ness of this version gets you nowhere. I'm specifically
*not* saying you should trust your business to a unsupported version
of something as critical as a database. I'm just saying that open
source doesn't really mean much in this context.

>> The entirety of the open-source version
>> of Ingres is covered by the GPL, including the connection libs, which
>> means the open-source version can *only* be used with GPL software;
>> any other license, proprietary *or* non-GPL open-source cannot.
>
> "Used with" is vague here. What you mean is "linked with".
> I can perfectly well run the open source version of Ingres on MS
> Windows at work and a home.

Yes, true, but again: you can do that because it's licensed at
zero-cost, as are some of the other serious DB products. The
open-sourceness of Ingres doesn't come into play at all. Used-with,
linked-with, potato-potahto. If you can't link against it, how will
you use it? Because the connection libs are GPL, not LGPL, both
dynamic and static linking are touched by the license, so the only way
to legally connect to the database and share your software, for free
or for fee, under anything other than the GPL, is by implementing the
raw wire protocol in your software (which is a lot more complicated
than I thought it would be).

> But more importantly, no limitations of any kind arise unless you intend
> to distribute your software.

Which sorta-kinda seems to be the point of building software to me.
It's been a while since I built software purely for the personal
intellectual challenge. And again, this kind of use is not unique to
Ingres, and not tied to it being open-source, just zero-cost.

> So there is no limitation on what you do
> during development and there is no limitation on what you do "in-house".

OK, but all major players have a version you can tinker with for
development. I pleaded with Ingres for the longest time to make a
restricted version available instead of the open source version, just
like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle do. I was, in fact, offered such a version,
very specifically tied to this one project we were working on at the
time, but since I was looking to standardize for multiple projects,
that wasn't really a sensible option. I still think Ingres should do
an Express/Lite version.

> You only get into trouble when you want to distribute your software. At
> that point you need to license the commercial version or GPL your own
> software (which of course has to be capable of being GPL'd).

Right, so when Ingres Corp says (as they did at the time) that this
was good for open source, they took an astoundingly narrow view of
open source. Of the 9 most popular open source licenses listed by OSI,
only one is supported. Never mind the 57 other OSI-approved licences.

>> I was
>> bitten by the IPL-to-GPL license transition just as we were going to go
>> live on Ingres, with a support contract and all, and the response from
>> Ingres Corp boiled down to "sucks to be you", and all this just weeks
>> after I was interviewed by a national techno-rag extolling Ingres Open
>> Sources' virtues. Count me bitter on that aspect.
>
> You would not be the first person to be bitten in that way, and back
> then I would definitely have been bitten too. But knowing what we know
> now it it is obvious that the Free Software Foundation intends us to
> be prevented from developing proprietary software using GPL'd
> components. That is the whole point of the GPL. That is also why dual
> licensing is common practice. Us being naive about that is not a
> problem with the licence.

We had legal spell out the CA-TOSL in depth before we embarked on
our adventure. CA was very, very eager to have me speak to the
techno-rag and be included in their reference portfolio. The only
naivite involved was trusting CA/Ingres, not so much being mis-informed
about what the license meant.

>> Open source is usually touted for two main reasons -- greater control
>> of your own destiny, and cost.
>
> People can propose any benefit of using open source that they like. It
> doesn't mean they are right and it doesn't mean they are relevant.
> Control of your destiny was never plausible. The first time I looked at
> the GPL code for an RS232 to Ethernet concentrator I was using almost 20
> years ago I realized I didn't have time in my busy day to be messing
> with that. A more plausible advantage of open source is that it is a
> kind of public escrow, so you can have a bit more comfort trying
> something new from a smaller vendor.

So we're agreeing on this, it seems. Open source is nice for toying
around, but doesn't yield a strong business benefit. I don't find the
escrow argument to be very compelling. Let's say Ingres, for the sake of
argument, decides to pack up, or take the product into a direction that
doesn't agree with you, the escrow bit only helps if you're building
GPL software to begin with, and are inclined to start supporting this
forked version. We might have a different interpretation on some of
the events that happened, or of the value of these events, but I think
we're not disagreeing that going there would be a hard road to take.

> Just out of curiosity, back when you were getting bitten was there a
> really good reason why your employer could not have GPL'd the software
> you were working on? Was there a problem with a cocktail of
> incompatible licenses,

Yes. Incorporating a new license, not specifically open source either,
was a nightmare.

> or were there other legitimate proprietary
> obstructions? Or was it just an automatic aversion to disclosing your
> source code? As you say, getting to peek at the code doesn't really
> get anyone anywhere.

The only reason in addition to the cocktail problem would have been one of
embarrasment. The code was terrible. No sane person would have wanted
it. We were in fact strongly considering replacing delivery of this
product with one of our fiercest direct competitor. The only redeeming
feature the software had is that it could be made to work, most of the
time, and a few major accounts insisted on its availability. In its
defence, it did a few things that were unique at the time.

>> But what passed for your management
>> around that time sucked. First against the wall when the revolution
>> comes.
>
> No, that is harsh.

I'm not talking about Emma or Sam. There was this Indian fellow that
they've since sensibly booted that was my contact.

> They did do a very poor job of educating us about
> what open source and CA-TOSL meant,

I don't think it was their responsibility to educate anyone
about what the CA-TOSL meant. The CA-TOSL was actually very liberal.
Very few restrictions indeed, and widely compatible with open source
licenses. I am of the opinion you should very carefully study any
license, no matter whether it's open source or propietary.

> and they repeated the error when
> they adopted GPL.

A little heads-up would have been appreciated. I know perfectly well
what the GPL entails.

For the record, I'm not saying I think Ingres shouldn't have done what
they did. It's their technology, their investment. But communication
was abysmal around the switchover, which pissed me off something
fierce.

Meh, I'm not really looking to convince anyone to have Ingres change
this. The main bit that grates on me is that I think the reasoning behind
the open source spiel uses the all the right words but doesn't deliver
on any of it in practice. I'm a big boy, Ingres could have told me
"there's no business in free databases" and I would have accepted
that. I might not have been happy about after they had me waving their
open source flag, but I get it.

My main argument is that "commercial open source" is in this case a marketing
term devoid of meaning. You get no peek at the SQL Server code, nor
at the Oracle or DB2 code, yet all the benefits the open-source Ingres
implies are just as easily reaped from these fully-closed products.

What remains is a solid product that can squarely hold its own against the
big boys -- sane license costing, broad platform support, enterprise
features, follow-the-sun customer support, which you have to
experience to appreciate just how incredibly amazig a thing it is, and
yes, a zero-cost tinkering version -- without distracting from that
message with empty feel-good statements about open source.

--
Emiliano

On 2009-06-30, Emiliano <emile@iris-advies.nl> wrote:
> Hello Roy,
>
> On 2009-06-29, Roy Hann <specially@processed.almost.meat> wrote:
>>> Good luck using the open-source
>>> variant in a commercial setting.
>>
>> Using the community version of *any* open source software in
>> a commercial setting (or more precicesly, in a "business critical"
>> setting) would be reckless.

I really like a good argument, hence my previous posting, but I really
could have stopped here. You cannot get Commercial support from Ingres
for the Open Source version of Ingres. So there is Commercial Ingres,
and Open Source Ingres, but no Commercial Open Source Ingres.

--
Emiliano

2009/6/30 Emiliano <emile@iris-advies.nl>

>
> I really like a good argument, hence my previous posting, but I really
> could have stopped here. You cannot get Commercial support from Ingres
> for the Open Source version of Ingres. So there is Commercial Ingres,
> and Open Source Ingres, but no Commercial Open Source Ingres.
>

Commercial and community Ingres version are not the same ? Are you sure ?

I have many customers experience saying the opposite. The support tell them
they can install a patch on any of those version ...

Regards,
Jean-Pierre ZUATE

Roy Hann wrote:
> I was on the conference call the day before it was
> announced that Ingres was being open sourced and we were all
> *bitterly* opposed to the idea.

I find that quite puzzling, Roy. My own reaction, reading about it later,
was the exact opposite. Perhaps, I thought, Ingres might survive after
all. But, then, I have no direct economic interest in Ingres or its
survival.

What was the source of the bitter opposition?

--jkl

James K. Lowden wrote:

> Roy Hann wrote:
>> I was on the conference call the day before it was
>> announced that Ingres was being open sourced and we were all
>> *bitterly* opposed to the idea.
>
> I find that quite puzzling, Roy. My own reaction, reading about it later,
> was the exact opposite. Perhaps, I thought, Ingres might survive after
> all. But, then, I have no direct economic interest in Ingres or its
> survival.
>
> What was the source of the bitter opposition?

The bitter opposition was a result of not understanding why or how
going open source would help, and thinking there were a lot of ways it
it could get really bad for us.

Remember the original announcement came from CA, and CA never
announced anything to do with Ingres that didn't turn out to be a
pain. In the absence of any coherent road-map to prosperity it was
impossible not to leap to the worst conclusions.

Even now I don't know if there ever was a real plan or whether Tony
Gaughan had just decided to throw the pieces up in the air to see what
would happen. I strongly suspect he was just hoping for the best and I
suspect if Garnett & Hellfrich had not come along, CA would pretty
quickly have decided to end the experiment (and the product).

Based on what we knew then, we were probably right to be opposed. I
am certain the success Ingres enjoys today is down to the decisions of
the management team G&H put in place, not anything CA did.

Of course there are people who know exactly what was going on inside CA
and I would be pleased to hear their side of the story. All I know is
that we hated the idea based on what we were told.

--
Roy

UK Ingres User Association Conference 2010 will be on Tuesday June 8 2010
Go to http://www.iua.org.uk/join to get on the mailing list.

[Bodo]

Because the connection libs are GPL, not LGPL, both
dynamic and static linking are touched by the license, so the only way
to legally connect to the database and share your software, for free
or for fee, under anything other than the GPL, is by implementing the
raw wire protocol in your software (which is a lot more complicated
than I thought it would be).

That's just not true.
What does you make think that you have to GPL your software when connecting to a database via JDBC, ODBC or a .Net DataProvider, where you can specify the driver etc. at runtime?
I can perfectly use Open Source Ingres in a JavaEE AppServer environment, e.g. WebSphere or WebLogic - this doesn't require ÍBM or Oracle to make their software to be GPL.

On 2009-06-30, Ingres Forums <info-ingres@kettleriverconsulting.com> wrote:
>
>> Because the connection libs are GPL, not LGPL, both
>> dynamic and static linking are touched by the license, so the only way
>> to legally connect to the database and share your software, for free
>> or for fee, under anything other than the GPL, is by implementing the
>> raw wire protocol in your software (which is a lot more complicated
>> than I thought it would be).
> That's just not true.
> What does you make think that you have to GPL your software when
> connecting to a database via JDBC, ODBC or a .Net DataProvider, where
> you can specify the driver etc. at runtime?

What makes me think that is a) our legal dept. said so, and b) Ingres
Corp confirmed it. There's a reason we were offered the one-off "lite"
version.

All the drivers you name are Ingres Corp property, covered by
the GPL. Connecting using your own implementation of the wire protocol
would probably put you in the clear, but who wants to go there?

The linking issue is a grey area, the wikipedia page has some
interesting info on this (skip to the bit about "Linking and
derivative works" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License)

> I can perfectly use Open Source Ingres in a JavaEE AppServer
> environment, e.g. WebSphere or WebLogic - this doesn't require ??BM or
> Oracle to make their software to be GPL.

I have no doubt that you *can*, technically. But the ingres open
source driver for java is GPL. As the Wikipedia page says, it's a
legal grey area whether the driver manager ought to load it because
of the license conflict. I seriously doubt Ingres Corp is actually going
to smack anyone over the head with this, but I'm pretty sure that whoever
supplied your java dbms driver manager doesn't provide you with full
indemnification to cover this issue.

--
Emiliano