OK, I don’t know how I possibly missed this, but last month Computer Associates has released its Ingres r3 database product as open source software!
Now, I’ve been using MySQL for many years, and have been recently considering using PostgreSQL in order to get features that MySQL is still lacking (views, stored procedures, etc.) — but now, I can use Ingres instead!
You can download Ingres r3 today! (Requires free site registration.) The current source tarball is ~76MB. I’ll be downloading it tonight … expect to see an AOLserver nsingres module soon.
I don’t know if you can tell … but damn, I’m excited …
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
You don’t think it’s possible that ingres will suffer the same fate as Borland’s interbase? I mean, big corporations suddenly releasing their software as Open Source … They don’t really get a pick up from the public at large … and also Borland’s release was buggy and unstable when it was first released, which put me off it forever … :)
I think that it’s possible, but unlikely.
Borland has been slowly disappearing from the marketplace: they were once a contender in the language compiler marketplace (Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, Delphi, etc.) but now all they’ve really got going for them is Delphi, which is really nothing more than Pascal with OO extensions (if Borland were Microsoft, Delphi would just be called “Microsoft Visual Pascal++”). Today, it’s clear that Borland isn’t able to compete in this market.
Borland also used to have some market share in the small-to-midsize database market with Paradox and Foxpro, along with Interbase. Again, all of their database offerings have pretty much evaporated. It’s clear that Borland isn’t able to compete in this market, either.
On the other hand, CA (Computer Associates), the current owner of the Ingres database, have built enterprise-class tools to use, manage and support Ingres databases. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe some of the other CA products use Ingres as the underlying data store under the hood.
In addition, CA is at least making the appearance to fund the Ingres open source effort by putting forth a $1 *million* dollar challenge for the OSS community to build migration tools from Oracle/Sybase/DB2/SQL Server/MySQL to Ingres — that’s a lot of money to invest, IMHO, and I don’t think they’d watch Ingres go the way of the Interbase dodo after spending that kind of money.
Of course, there’s nothing saying that all of CA’s good intentions don’t go to waste, and in 3 years people will be asking “Ingres who? Wasn’t that some archaic DBMS built by some university academic many years ago?” … but, I think it’s unlikely.
I see Ingres eating the lunch of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and if the necessary installer and tools become available for Win32 … even Microsoft’s SQL Server.
So, I’m ramping up my Ingres clue now so that I can be ahead of the curve, with some good solid experience under my belt, so I can offer professional services and consulting when the timing is right. It won’t be silly money like the good ol’ dot-com days, but it’ll be more work that’ll pay well …