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Databases Programming Software The Almighty Buck IT

CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results 217

Posted by timothy from the cash-nearly-in-hand dept.
Anil Kandangath writes "Last year, Computer Associates open sourced their Ingres DMBS and they also announced a $1mn bounty for open source conversion toolkits from other databases to Ingres. Well, the toolkits are up on SourceForge and the bounty has been won by three teams, two from India and one from New York. More details and links to the projects on the CA news page. This is one of the greatest bounties for open source software and will hopefully serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code."
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CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results More

CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results

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  • There's an idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:23PM (#12570533) Homepage
    1. Sit around and wait for a Fortune 500 company to issue a $1M bounty
    2. Try to code a solution and hope you actually win (was: ???)
    3. Profit!!
    I think I'm going to quit my day job now. This looks like a great business model, not to mention an excellent way to pay the mortgage.
    • Might work, if bounty based hit and run development turns out to be sufficiently cheaper than hiring someone to develop and support a piece of software.

      My guess is it will only ever work for medium sized and relatively independent projects. We'll see.
    • 1 Million dollars is a lot more to an Indian (in India) than a person in the states. It's like having a 10 Million dollar contest in India which is greater incentive. Although you'd think someone from all the OSS groups would have seen it as a valid challenge. My company could sure use $400,000. I'm not sure we would have been inclined to do it without a guarantee though.

      What about all the people that tried and failed. No risk for CA, 100% of the risk on the development team/company.

      It seems they over pai
      • heck, you can get a programmer residing in the US for less than $11k/mo ...
    • Dude, but you will have to compete against Indians. Just look at this case, 2 teams from India and third guy is from NY but Indian.
    • 1. Begin working online, i've seen sites which offer bounties (or bids actually) for ceratin projects.
      2. Eventually more open source bounties begin appearing. Pick them if you can.
      3. Constant profit!

      Was it that hard to figure out?
    • Or you could work on 20,000 projects which are offering $50 bounties [slashdot.org] and cash in just the same.
    • It's a great business model for a developer if you win.

      That's a big if.

      The hundred people who spent $10 million in collective time losing make it a great business model for CA, not the developer community, as they get $10 million worth of software for $1 million.

  • One milli-nano dollar? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bingo Foo ( 179380 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:24PM (#12570555)
    What kind of bounty is $1mn?

    $1 x (10^-3) x (10^-9) = $1 x 10^-12.

    No thanks.

  • Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Loco3KGT ( 141999 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:25PM (#12570563)
    Two of those contestants worked for Oracle... ...and released a tool to ease migration from Oracle to CA's database.

    Boy I hope Oracle doesn't hear about this.
    • I noticed that too, but I think the tool they built was the one to migrate from mssql.
      • Yeah, but do you think they used some insider knowledge, since Oracle probably makes a MSSQL converter to get people to come to Oracles DB. So it wouldn't supprise me if they used some Oracle info, thus they still have a high chance of loosing their jobs. But they are in the money so it doesn't matter, unless Oracle sues them for it.
    • Well, the bounty was more than Oracle would ever pay an Indian programmer over the course of that programmer's career, so I don't think they would care if Oracle found out.

      I know I would tell my employer to shove it if I won a few hundred grand.

  • Team India !~ (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:25PM (#12570564)
    2 of the top 3 teams are from india, and the third entry from NY is an Indian guy.
    Changing trends.

  • Cheaper, definitely. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shmlco ( 594907 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:25PM (#12570568) Homepage
    ...serve as a model for other companies taking this path of cheaper development and better code.

    Cheaper, definitely. Whether or not a team scrambling to meet a bounty deadline results in better code is open to debate.

    • Re:Cheaper, definitely. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have always noticed that perfectionists ALWAYS fail (and tend to talk more about 'better' code, yet do nothing!)
      • I have always noticed that perfectionists ALWAYS fail (and tend to talk more about 'better' code, yet do nothing!)

        There is a grain of truth in that. But the reason we fail is because the tools we use just aren't good enough!

        (Note: The above is a semi-serious self-parody.)

    • Yea, because we all know that inhouse developers scrambling to meet an inhouse deadlines build better code. I mean, you do 1 year of work in 3 months, not bad. Of course you get a bonus double that of last years, from $25 to $50.

      Now that's progress.
  • $1mn - 1 million dollars worth of nuts?

  • Does anyone know what sort of... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by under_score ( 65824 ) <.mishkin. .at. .berteig.com.> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:25PM (#12570571) Homepage
    development practices or methodology were used by the teams? It is impressive to see fairly major projects like this come so far in a single year's time.

  • All Indian ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EphemeralPhart ( 107572 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:26PM (#12570572)
    Judging from their surnames... maybe US companies oursource to India not only because they are, oh so much cheaper, but 'cause US coders, uhm, suck...

    Well, do they ?

    50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?

    • I think it's still a regional thing. You see alot of Indians who are masters at database work, especially Oracle. Many Asians are good at numerical analysis. Eastern Europeans are good at automata theory. Western Europeans are good at geometry. Americans seem more well rounded, not as specialized, or different people in different specializations.

      I know these are huge generalizations and that stuff is changing, but I think it has alot to do with where the pioneers end up. Probably some of the early Indians
    • $400,000 which was won by the top team is eqvt. to Rs 1.8 crore (180 million) which is a huuuge sum.. even when split 5 ways. Enough for them to start their own company or do their own thing for a lonnng time.
    • 50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?

      For an Indian software developer thats more like 3 years salary (and that too is a VERY generous annual salary.. for guys with 2 years of experience.)

  • Universities? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:30PM (#12570616) Homepage
    I've often wished universities would do stuff like this. They have large scale software needs, (usually) a significant budget, and a lot of complex and fairly unique product requirements. I would think funding open source tools would appeal to them both in an economic and academic way.

    Anybody who watched a Peoplesoft deployment at a university (and there were many of them) had to be both amused and shocked. I know my school spent millions - first to y2k proof an old system, then when that didn't satisfy them to go ahead and "upgraded" to Peoplesoft anyway. The result, at least from the student and professor point of view, was a nightmare. Buggy, klunky, and unpolished by any definition. I kept wondering why five or six universities couldn't have pooled their resources behind the GNU enterprise people. GNU enterprise + postgresql/ingres/whatever + other open web technologies couldn't POSSIBLY have done worse, and for that amount of $$ probably would have done MUCH better.

    Heck, our CS students probably could have done better than the interface we got stuck with. It's no wonder college costs keep going up if what I saw was typical of university spending decisions.

    • Re:Universities? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by winkydink ( 650484 ) *
      Way off topic, but a lot of implementations fail beacause:

      - Lack of executive commitment to the project
      - Business processes are poorly defined/understood
      - Consultants are poorly managed

      GNU enterprise? Which of the Big 4 is going to sign off on GNU enterprise? Well, I guess if you have enough cash, one of them will, but I'd imagine that one would want to spend one's cash in better ways.
      • > GNU enterprise? Which of the Big 4 is going to sign off on GNU enterprise? Well, I guess if you
        > have enough cash, one of them will, but I'd imagine that one would want to spend one's cash in
        > better ways.

        A company spend it's money to fund software development that will then be given away (to its competators) for free? They'd have to be crazy. Universities, national labs, etc? Yes. But profitable companies? Definately not.

        jfs

    • Re:Universities? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:40PM (#12570721) Journal
      You know what would also be cool? If they took your tuition money to Atlantic City and plunked it all down on red 36.

      You don't know what you're going to get when you issue a bounty like this. It's a gamble. A good contract has obligations spelled out for both parties.

      For every bungled deployment, there are dozens even hundreds that go smoothly. People just don't hop online and bitch when things work right.
      • True. I guess I should have specified a contract, rather than a bounty. Of course, if you establish minimum necessary conditions for the awarding of the bounty you are reasonably safe, unless your deadline is such that you can afford no delay.

        An open system, done correctly, could be used by universities everywhere and lower the overall cost of a university education. Wouldn't that be a worthwhile goal?

      • Re:Universities? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Perl-Pusher ( 555592 )
        You know what would also be cool? If they took your tuition money to Atlantic City and plunked it all down on red 36.

        Not really, if nothing meets your needs nobody wins the cash. This is alot different than the government which pays a contractor. If the contractor loses the contract do to poor work, they usually get paid for the work up done to that point.

      • "People just don't hop online and bitch when things work right."

        heh.
        And Taco says nobody bothers to read the comments on /. !

    • What makes you think students could do a better job? Sure, the Peoplesoft deployment went poorly, but imagine what would happen if you had to write the code then deploy it. You seem to be under the impressive that what Peoplesoft does is throw a DB together with some interface and voila! you've got the backend infrastructure that will support a large university. Its an end to end process that goes beyond simply throwing a DB at the university. Migrating data, implementing the layout of the DB, etc etc.

    • Re:Universities? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gribflex ( 177733 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @11:34PM (#12574052) Homepage
      You ever hear of a product called WebCT? It is a commonly used web application used for distributing course notes, grades, emails, and other related material. An overrated CMS.

      Well, here is a brief history of WebCT. (some facts may be slightly off, this is recounted from memory)

      It was originally developed at UBC (in Vancouver BC, Canada) by a prof and some students. As it was created at a public institution, using research money from the Government, the prof felt that it should be released for Free (as in beer). His thoughts were that the people had already paid for it through their taxes.

      Well, the software took off, and gained a lot of popularity. Then the University stepped in and said 'only people from BC should get this for free, it was mostly funded by provincial money', and so the software remained free for BC organizations, but was sold to people outside of BC.

      Then the software was outsourced/sold to a private company who promised to keep the same pricing model (free to BC people, not free to others). They kept up with it a bit, and maintained it a little.

      Then that software company sold WebCT again, to a different company. The second company did not promise to keep it free and started charging everyone. The second company also stopped updating the software, and did nothing to improve it. Then they increased the cost. Now they charge people way way too much for software that sucks (read: doesn't work on anything other than IE in Windows).

      And every CS student who has ever used the product claims 'I coulda made this crap for free...' and they probably could have, because it was University CS students that did make that crap, and for free.

      Every IT department however, seems to think that they can only buy software.

      OK, so if it had been released as free (as in speech) software, things would have been a little better, but still.

  • Migrating applications.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:31PM (#12570633)
    Sounds great.. Until you think about migrating applications; all those nifty stored procedures, never mind c or java tie-ins. The winners still have a long list of unmapped functions that aren't converted.

    So, to what extent are these apps actually ready for the lime light, and to what extent did CA just choose a date to give away some money to grab some "free" publicity?

    Also, it reflects quite poorly on all the databases (Oracle, DB2, and Ingres itself) that you *need* tools like this. If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..
    • If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..

      Dude, how is a business going to tie people into the perpetual upgrade cycle and maintenance contracts by using a standard?
    • Also, it reflects quite poorly on all the databases (Oracle, DB2, and Ingres itself) that you *need* tools like this. If they could only have figured out how to stick to standards (or *jointly* come up with new, open standards) none of this would be necessary..

      You seem to be confused about the motivating factors that drive these large corporations. Their goal is to maximise their own profits. It is in no way in Oracle's interests to encourage migration off of Oracle onto an open source alternative. Why wo

  • Wow...Has Tech Labor Truly Become so Cheap? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ultimabaka ( 864222 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:32PM (#12570634)
    I remember one particular scam I heard about when I first started looking for a job (I'm looking in Finance, but saw many CS programming ads as well) - it went a little something like this:

    (a) Place job offer in newspaper
    (b) Interview a bunch of candidates
    (c) "Test" them all by making them write code to solve your problems for you while not being on the payroll.
    (d) "Hire" one person, enjoy working code.

    I can only imagine how much invaluable code this company got from making this $1m offer. I can guarantee you it was probably worth a helluva lot more than $1m. But, of course, none of the other entrants received a penny. This is just a glorified example of what I described above.

    If this is the current state of labor in the programming sector, I worry and feel truly bad for you poor folks out there looking.

    • Re:Wow...Has Tech Labor Truly Become so Cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jherek Carnelian ( 831679 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @05:32PM (#12571187)
      (d) "Hire" one person, enjoy working code.

      Sounds like an urban legend.

      Project management is already such a complex process to get right when the developers are all under one roof and able to talk to each other that it would be nearly impossible to get anything remotely like a working system from the process you described. The end result would be more like a mish-mash of routines, all written with subtle differences "standard" input/out data structures and different assumptions about requirements and behaviour.

      I can only imagine how much invaluable code this company got from making this $1m offer. I can guarantee you it was probably worth a helluva lot more than $1m. But, of course, none of the other entrants received a penny. This is just a glorified example of what I described above.

      I doubt that much of the code they received was particularly valuable on its own. Sure it is possible that the code might be incorporated into another project, but it is more than likely that re-inventing the wheel would be easier then re-using code that was a) not written with a plan of re-use and b) the original developers are not even around to ask about how the code works and what kind of ways it expects to interact with other code or systems. Its pretty much an all or nothing proposition - either submissions get used for what they were designed for or they are going to rot away at the bottom of some DVD-R spindle.

  • Ingres DMBS? (Score:4, Funny)

    by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:32PM (#12570641) Journal
    Data Mace Banishment System?

  • Nice payday! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PenguinBoyDave ( 806137 ) <davidNO@SPAMdavidmeyer.org> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:33PM (#12570655)
    I'm glad to see that CA followed-through on this. While I am not sure how many people will actually migrate to Ingres, the fact that they put up the money, had non-CA judges review the entries, and gave them the recognition they deserve, to me anyway, shows that CA is making a good faith effort to show the Open Source Community that they indeed want to change the direction that CA has gone in the past. I see this as a good thing.

  • Surprise surprise (Score:5, Informative)

    by interlingua.ro ( 654566 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:33PM (#12570658)
    Contest rules:
    the contest is intended for presentation in the united states, canada (except quebec province), mexico, india, china, the united kingdom, australia and new zealand. do not proceed within this site if you are not a resident of one of these countries.
    (the lameness filter is lame)
    No wonder the winners are from India.
  • It makes sense that those from India are superb programmers and won this contest -- so many of our IT jobs are being outsourced over there.
  • I worked with Ingress on the PC over SCO Unix
    in the early 90's and found it so much easier to work with than Oracle. That said, this
    is really old technology, right? Does
    it really deserve a big whup?

    Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger
    (or perhaps is just killing me really, really
    slowly...)

  • One for Access (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:45PM (#12570769)
    When will we have a DB conversion tool for MS-Access (read Microsoft's Jet engine)? Who will finance it any way? Slashdotters, this is a request to you to head over to http://koffice.org/kexi/ [koffice.org] and contribute in any way you can. I do my part by the way. Kexi still has a pretty long way to go to catch up with Jet's scripting possibilities. We still have a challenge to attract all those VB programmers to the language kexi will use for scripting in the quest to add business logic to an application.

    Some of my best VB code was one that converted money to words. The other was report printing depending on what the user selected...all was done on the fly. I have no idea how I'd implement that in kexi. This I guess will call for learning a new language. I know there is an opensource one on sourceforge but it's not there yet.

  • Unclaimed Bounties (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    for Informix, DB2, and Sybase. Unfortunately, the deadline has passed. If the converters are released as open-source, perhaps the tools can be enhanced to accommodate these other RDBMS

  • seems like it would result in crappy code (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:47PM (#12570786) Homepage
    This turns it into a race. In the rush to be first, many things will just be hacked together rather than properly written/tested/thought out.

  • more work to do (Score:1, Redundant)

    by necrognome ( 236545 )
    from tfa:

    "Are Indian's the smartest software programmers? It sure seems so!"

    Work on the punctuation and get back to us... :)

  • WTF is a mn? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:50PM (#12570818) Homepage Journal
    Are we just making up abbreviations now? What exactly is $1mn? Is mn some currency I have never heard of? Does it mean something special about the award?

    Seriously, after about 10 seconds I realized it stood for million, but lets refer to our good friend Google:

    Results 1 - 10 of about 4,220 for $1mn
    Results 1 - 10 of about 111,000 for $1mil
    Results 1 - 10 of about 621,000 for $1M

    • Re:WTF is a mn? (Score:3, Informative)

      by generic-man ( 33649 )
      mn for million is British, commonly seen in the Financial Times (which also uses bn for billion). I imagine that it's a nod to the old British way of naming large numbers, which also included milliards (10^9) and billiards (10^15; a billion was 10^12).

      In any case, it's struck a nerve even deeper than the accounting term "$1MM" for "one million," which apparently makes SI-loving geeks' heads explode.

  • I sure hope this doesn't serve as a model (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @04:57PM (#12570893) Journal

    What a wonderful way to get a lot of people to waste their time and profit from it. Let's see if this can be rephrased for better comprehension...

    Your Dream Job!!!

    Gifted developer's needed to create DB conversion utilities to facilitate adoption of newly open sourced database. Simply put a team together and invest a year of your own time to develop a candidate project. If it happens to rise above the competition (perhaps a one in five chance if we don't get too many responses), you will actually be paid!!!

    ...

    Thanks, but no thanks. I sure hope the world isn't so full of suckers that this approach becomes widespread. I like being able to feed my family.

  • from tfa (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frieked ( 187664 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @05:00PM (#12570917) Homepage Journal
    Only $550,000 was actually awarded out of a total pool of $1mn (mn? wtf?):
    The winning projects were: Shift2Ingres, submitted by Harsh Azad, Rohit Gaddi, Achal Rastogi, Geetanjali Bahuguna and Ashutosh Upadhyay of New Delhi, India, won the largest prize of $400,000; EzyMigrate, submitted by Danes John and Varghese Jacob of Kerala, India, was awarded a prize of $100,000; and DbConverter, submitted by Bipin Prasad of New York, was awarded a prize of $50,000.

    Here's links to the winning projects:
    http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/shift2ingres [sourceforge.net]
    http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ezymigrate [sourceforge.net]
    http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/dbcvt [sourceforge.net]

    • The winning projects were: Shift2Ingres, submitted by Harsh Azad, Rohit Gaddi, Achal Rastogi, Geetanjali Bahuguna and Ashutosh Upadhyay of New Delhi, India, won the largest prize of $400,000; EzyMigrate, submitted by Danes John and Varghese Jacob of Kerala, India, was awarded a prize of $100,000; and DbConverter, submitted by Bipin Prasad of New York, was awarded a prize of $50,000.

      >
      ALL these programmers - whether India-based or from New York - are Indian. OK... one of them is probably an American.

  • India never ceases to amaze me. No bias there of course :) ... Power to my people!
  • I wish SourceForge's community features were more sophisticated. I'd like teams to be able to collaborate with each other more, for projects to be created as requirements with bounties (then populated by teams), for projects to advertise bounties required for completion. Maybe with negotiation features, like auctions or otherwise, to determine bounty amounts and acceptance tests.

  • Topcoders vs CA Winners (Score:2, Informative)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) *
    All of the CA winners were apparently from India originally. Look at the TopCoders [laboratory...states.com] and tell me if you see one guy who looks like he is from India (at least originally).

    Now it might make sense that there was a somewhat different distribution for the two contests but be real... this demands an explanation.

    • I guess it just means that the topcoders site is not popular within India.

    • Re:Topcoders vs CA Winners (Score:4, Interesting)

      by adbudha kusu ( 658867 ) on Wednesday May 18, 2005 @06:02PM (#12571431)
      Good observation but a closer look explains it. 1) Topcoder payouts are generally micro-payouts. And most of the decent Indian programmers are employed, and hence not "motivated" enough. The CA payout apparently was enough motivation. 2) I haven't looked lately but if I am not mistaken most of the topcoder payouts go to eastern europe. I suspect the decent programmers there have more time on their hands. As these countries catch the outsourcing wave, suspect their numbers on tc will drop accordingly. Yeah, i minored in freudian socialogy.
      • most of the topcoder payouts go to eastern europe

        The top 5 top coders country of residence:

        1. Canada (Snapdragon)
        2. US (Tomek -- Purdue University)
        3. Poland (Eryx)
        4. Australian (John Dethridge)
        5. US (Snewman)
  • I thought Ingres has been superceded by Postgres many moons ago. Does anyone know whether Ingres offer anything worth while?

    • Re:Postgres (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dfetter ( 2035 )
      If you use Ingres, you get to deal with CA's attorneys over any licensing issues that may arise.

      If you use PostgreSQL, you get to deal with the 3-clause BSD license and a vibrant developer community.
  • I guess it sucks to be you if you just spent the last several months of your life trying to do this and just got beat.
  • It makes me wonder where the US (not the New Yorker from India) placed in this and where their submissions are - I highly doubt that their submissions would be that bad on their own. I just see this as another PR article for offshoring to downplay the problem of US being high enough quality to have to fix offshored code regularly(and thus negating any "competitive advantage" the Far East has).
  • The guy in New York got $50K for his efforts, which will pay for maybe 9mos living expenses, yet the teams from India that got the higher payouts ...that buys a hell of a lot of tech toys and a very nice house in India. Hell, probably several houses.

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