[Info-Ingres] Ingres 2006 Release 2

[Emiliano]

On 2007-10-19, Artemus Ward <coddbotherer at work.and.play> wrote:
> The situation is still pretty unclear, but I guess the idea is even if I 
> don't buy support and indemnification I would still be stealing the benefit 
> of the QA the certified executables have gone through.

That's not stealing. If IngresCorp makes Ingres available as open
source, that's their decision to make.

> So now I want to build a Windows executable from source.  I think I am 
> allowed to do that right?

I don't see what benefit you'd get from building Ingres yourself,
but yes, you could. The binaries would still be covered by the GPL,
however, so building applications that use those would also have to be
GPL (the exception being ODBC -- maybe).

I've gone over this particular issue with IngresCorp extensively in
the past, and while the answer was invariable clouded in talk about
what would be best for some vaguely defined "community", that answer
also invariably boiled down to "you can't, unless your app is GPL".

Which is fine, it's their product after all.

The reason why I'm personally not too happy about the switch from
CA-TOSL (which did allow the kind of use we've been discussing here)
and the GPL for everything including the connection libs (which was
the trouble spot) is that we made a substantial engineering investment
in porting to Ingres, and the GPL issue hit us just a few weeks from
us going GA with our own product.

We did release our app on r3 (CA-TOSL), but immediately started work on
porting to SQL Server.  While Ingres offered a better price/performance
for our situation even with the new-and-improved-but-not-free certified
binaries, we didn't feel comfortable progressing with a vendor that
would leave us dangling in the wind without notice. And yes, we did have
a support contract.

An additional benefit from going with SQL Server was that a large part
of our customers didn't need extensive DB capacity, and SQL Server
Express served their needs, and was free. Microsoft offers this,
Oracle offers this, IBM offers this, and I've pleaded with IngresCorp
to release something similar (Ingres light), but to no avail.

Bitter, me? No. Just a bit wiser. Get what you need in writing, for
the period you think you'll need it, and then some.

-- 
Emiliano