CA's $1m offer has geeks rushing to download

Nothing motivates like money. $1 million to be precise. And Indian software programmers who believe in open source seem to be a highly motivated lot, if management software provider Computer Associates International Inc (CA) is to be believed.

CA in early August this year had announced the Ingress Million Dollar Challenge, a first in the history of the open source community, to leverage the global talent of open source developers, to develop migration tool kits for Ingres r3, which is the latest database platform offering from the company.

Under the terms of the offer, open source developers are invited to create solutions that enable users of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Informix and/or MySQL to migrate to the Ingres r3 database platform. Solutions that pass muster will be eligible for cash awards of up to $400,000, with a total prize money on offer of $1 million.

Speaking to Business Standard, Mark Barrenechea, executive vice president of product development at CA, said that Ingres r3 was the only open source database platform in the market at present.

"We have had more than 5,000 registered downloads ever since we announced this contest about three weeks back. A significant number of the downloads are from India. The rewards are part of our initiative to popularise open source platforms and we will announce the winners."

"This allows us to leverage the cumulative talent of the community, while generating significant financial opportunities for open source developers around the world," Barranchea said.

The open source technology has become more attractive in recent times to companies that are trying to lower their IT costs while staying on the right side of the hectic innovation that is happening because of the open source community.

According to analysts the advantages are especially impressive in the database space, where proprietary offerings can add to the cost of business solutions and make the IT infrastructure inflexible to the changing requirements.

The Ingres database itself was proprietary once and got an open source makeover in May this year. The database is a particularly compelling alternative to proprietary database platforms and by developing migration tools, the open source community is expected to help organisations take advantage of the benefits that Ingres has to offer - while at the same time promoting the transition from proprietary to open source technology.

The $1 million offer began on August 5 and submissions will be accepted until February 1, 2005. Six winners will be announced at CAWorld, CA's annual user conference to be held between April 17 and 21, 2005, in Orlando, Florida. That's when we'll know if an Indian geek has hit the jackpot.