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Ingres CTO sees open-source database move

01.03.2006
Dave Dargo is chief technical officer at open-source database vendor, Ingres Corp. Like many other Ingres executives, Dargo is a veteran of Oracle Corp., having spent 15 years there, including a spell helping to manage Oracle's Linux and open-source strategy. Until the late 1980s, Redwood City, Calif.-based Ingres was Oracle's chief rival in the enterprise arena. As a result, Dargo said in a recent interview, Ingres' latest 2006 version is more enterprise-ready than open-source rivals such as MySQL -- and far cheaper in terms of support than Oracle or IBM's DB2.

What was the significance of Oracle's recent purchase of open-source software maker, Sleepycat Software Inc.? I wouldn't call Oracle's buy of SleepyCat a move into the open-source world. Oracle has been making lots of different acquisitions, both open-source and closed-source companies, in order to shore up its customer base. All of the open-source companies Oracle has bought own 100 percent of the intellectual property, in order to broaden the number of people required to pay Oracle support. What I think they're going to tell their customers is: 'If you want any Oracle support, you're going to need Oracle support on all of your products.'

I think it's a heavy-handed strategy to customers. And the most heavy-handed part is that many of these customers had chosen these products in order to avoid doing business with Oracle. And now they're getting sucked into that Oracle machine. And that's what is making people the most nervous.

The impact on Ingres is beneficial. We give comfort that there can be competition on the support side. That's our real market opportunity.

The big database vendors would say that they have co-opted the dual-licensing model of open-source vendors like yourself or MySQL by releasing free Express editions. They're starting to tout some of the customers they've won back as a result. Do you think open-source's momentum has slowed as a result? I really don't see that at all. Customers started experimenting with open-source databases because they were successful with Linux and Apache Web server. And they recognized that their license fees weren't driving new product development. They desperately wanted the open-source business model. But the open-source databases are immature. They haven't gone through a 30-year maturation process like Oracle and DB2.

In the long run, you may see some temporary wins [by closed-source vendors with free editions] for those users who are making pure price decisions. But I think you're going to see more people driving towards [an] open-source business model. The real value of open-source is making it more efficient for new database features to be delivered to the market. For the leading-edge customers who still need new features, there are ways to get such features much quicker than paying license fees to closed-source vendors. When you want a change in a closed-source product, you have to lobby the vendor like you would lobby Congress.