Podcast Update

Tony Gaughan, Computer Associates, talked about his experience with open sourcing Ingres, a enterprise database engine. If you have investigated the open source from the perspective of a commercial vendor, he probably didn't introduce anything new. However, if you aren't, he provides a quick, accurate, and well articulated picture of the main issues facing commercial enterprises as they look at open source: licensing, total cost of ownership, cultural changes (he use this label, but it is evident that CA embraced cultural changes as they open sourced Ingres). He also addressed whether the open sourcing of Ingres purely a way for Computer Associates to dump it given its age and such. He didn't agree that this was the case. In contrast, he built the case that it is a great candidate for use in the enterprise given it stability, performance, and feature set. He indicated that the change to open source provided opportunity for new innovations. He provides a very good coverage of the general licensing concerns that one faces with open source. I agree with him that we all need to find a way to simply the range and applicability of open source licenses. Interesting that he indicated that the GPL was quickly dismissed largely due to its viral clauses. That matches my experience as well. For many open source projects, warmer acceptance and growth is going to be directly correlated with the commercial friendliness of the governing license.