CA's $1mn Open-Source Bounty Results 217
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."
There's an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There's an idea (Score:2)
My guess is it will only ever work for medium sized and relatively independent projects. We'll see.
Re:There's an idea (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:There's an idea (Score:1)
Re:There's an idea (Score:2)
Re:Believe It Or Not, Indian Programmers Vary As W (Score:2)
The poster of the original article said
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
Notice the cheaper development line? I have a number of friends from India and Bangladesh (sp?) and am always amazed at their recollectio
Attack of the Indians (Score:1)
D'OH!! (Score:2)
2. Eventually more open source bounties begin appearing. Pick them if you can.
3. Constant profit!
Was it that hard to figure out?
Re:There's an idea (Score:2)
Re:There's an idea (Score:2)
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)
$1 x (10^-3) x (10^-9) = $1 x 10^-12.
No thanks.
Re:One milli-nano dollar? (Score:1)
It's one peso moneda nacional
From the original submitter (Score:5, Informative)
1. $1mn... stupid me, that should have been $1M.
2. DMBS... aah..dyslexia? well, that should have been DBMS.
Also, the reason why I said that this model will produce cheaper (obviously) and better code is that since it will be open-sourced, even if the original code might have taken shortcuts to make the deadline, it is still out there for anyone to tinker with and fix (if needed). And it almost guarantees continuous development.
What about the editors? (Score:2)
Re:What about the editors? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about the editors? (Score:2)
Re:One milli-nano dollar? (Score:2)
Re:One milli-nano dollar? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:One milli-nano dollar? (Score:2)
Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:5, Funny)
Boy I hope Oracle doesn't hear about this.
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:2)
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:1)
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:3, Informative)
I know I would tell my employer to shove it if I won a few hundred grand.
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:1)
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:1)
I do love the AC that tried to post as me though.
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:1)
Re:Bad news for two of the guys... (Score:2)
Team India !~ (Score:5, Interesting)
Changing trends.
Cheaper, definitely. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:Cheaper, definitely. (Score:2)
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.)
Re:Cheaper, definitely. (Score:2)
Well, precisely!
Where may I subscribe to your newsletter?
Re:Cheaper, definitely. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that's progress.
$1mn? (Score:1)
Re:$1mn? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$1mn? (Score:2)
Re:$1mn? (Score:1)
(Don't suppose anyone here remembers Kung Pao: Enter the Fist that well)
Re:$1mn? (Score:1)
Re:$1mn? (Score:1)
I do..
Does anyone know what sort of... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does anyone know what sort of... (Score:2)
Bob
All Indian ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, do they ?
50k US$ seems to be a good fraction of a year's salary, ain't it ?
Re:All Indian ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:All Indian ? (Score:2)
Re:All Indian ? (Score:2)
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)
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)
- 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.
Re:Universities? (Score:1)
> 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:2)
Re:Universities? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Universities? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Read any of the Apple threads lately? (Score:1)
heh. /. !
And Taco says nobody bothers to read the comments on
Re:Universities? (Score:1)
Re:Universities? (Score:1)
http://www.csulb.edu/~cfa/peoplesoftlat.html [csulb.edu]
http://www.bsa.ca.gov/reports/summary.php?id=390 [ca.gov]
http://www.csus.edu/org/cfa/CFACMSBrief.htm [csus.edu]
The CSU system did not do a feasibility study, they didn't establish a business case, it is not going to achieve the goals they did establish, it won't even have all the functionality of the systems it is replacing, it will cost more to
Re:Universities? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Universities? (Score:2)
My knowledge is accurate as of about 18 months ago. Since then I'm sure it has been updated a bit.
Migrating applications.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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..
Re:Migrating applications.. (Score:1)
Dude, how is a business going to tie people into the perpetual upgrade cycle and maintenance contracts by using a standard?
Re:Migrating applications.. (Score:2)
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)
(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)
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)
Nice payday! (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprise surprise (Score:5, Informative)
No wonder the winners are from India.
Re:Surprise surprise (Score:1)
Editors: please correct the article description, it should say DBMS, not DMBS. Apologies to Dave Matthews Band fans.
Re: Indian winners (Score:1)
Ingres cool but... (Score:1)
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)
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.
Re:One for Access (Score:2)
Re:One for Access (Score:2)
if not then its not all that valuable imo
Unclaimed Bounties (Score:1, Insightful)
seems like it would result in crappy code (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:seems like it would result in crappy code (Score:2)
Give CA some credit - they're paying $1 million for this, it would be naive to think they're coughing up for some half-assed attempt. Give the developers some credit, they have pretty impressive bios.
Re:seems like it would result in crappy code (Score:2)
more work to do (Score:1, Redundant)
"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)
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)
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)
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)
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]
CA bounty winners are not from USA (Score:1)
>
ALL these programmers - whether India-based or from New York - are Indian. OK... one of them is probably an American.
Indians reign supreme (Score:1)
Re:Indians reign supreme (Score:2)
Bountiful SourceForge (Score:2)
Re:Bountiful SourceForge (Score:2)
Topcoders vs CA Winners (Score:2, Informative)
Now it might make sense that there was a somewhat different distribution for the two contests but be real... this demands an explanation.
Re:Topcoders vs CA Winners (Score:2)
Re:Topcoders vs CA Winners (Score:4, Interesting)
BZZT... You lose. (Score:2)
The top 5 top coders country of residence:
Can't be it... too many US resident Indians (Score:2)
Notice, please that one of the winning CA teams was in New York and they were originally from India.
There are lots of Indian programmers in the US and none are Topcoders.
Postgres (Score:2)
Re:Postgres (Score:2, Interesting)
If you use PostgreSQL, you get to deal with the 3-clause BSD license and a vibrant developer community.
Oh well... (Score:1)
Where's the non H1B(including .CN) country code? (Score:1)
Cost of Living in India + $ Reward = Wow. (Score:2)
Re:Grammar (Score:2)
Re:Another Attack on MS (Score:2, Informative)
It's only insecure if you don't put a password on the sa (read admin/root) account. Which is the users perogative not to do so (I frequently don't on development systems, because I don't care), as well as the users fault if it gets exposed (as none of mine did since my whole dev environment is quarantined on it's own subnet).
Re:Another Attack on MS (Score:3, Informative)
Holy crap! A good product? Well, they have a nice management console, and a lot of features that were advanced for the days when it was the same product as Sybase.
On the other hand, I could eat a bowl of punch card dots and shit a better SQL parser. Try solving a tricky problem with some standard but slightly complex SQL and watch it blow up. Ever try using bound parameters in subqueries? Hah! Not to mention that the T-SQL dialect is fu
Re:WTF is "$1mn"? (Score:2)
I assume you meant "One meeelleeeon dollars!!! muhahaha!!"
Re:DEAR CMDR TACO (Score:2)