It’s hard not to wax nostalgic when we talk to Ingres, but after our briefing last week on their decision to open source their OpenROAD 4GL tool, it was difficult to stifle yet more memories of rows of developers sitting on desktops on the show floors of DBExpo and Client/Server World madly coding away to win some T-shirt.
 

The reason for this bout of nostalgia was Ingres’s announcement that it is finally open sourcing its OpenROAD 4GL tools after clamor from some of its partners. According to long-suffering but finally rewarded CTO Emma McGrattan, the company initially didn't go open source with its tooling because it didn't see the point. There were so many other languages out there, how could you draw enough developers to make this one credible. Evidently, a number of partners began lobbying for it, as they wanted to open up OpenROAD’s interfaces so their clients could take advantage of popular tools that they were already using, like Subversion or Microsoft Visual SourceSafe in place of OpenROAD’s own source code control tool.

Since Ingres was spun off from CA and went open source in 2006, it has roughly doubled revenues, with $24 million in 2006 and $52 million in 2007; additionally, it has grown staff form 100 to about 2350 today, while making several strategic services firms acquisitions England, Germany (Europe is Ingres’ largest market), and recently, Australia, where the firm felt it needed a firmer presence to support one of its strongholds.

In essence, it was Ingres telling the community, stand up and prove to us that there’s enough interest to make this open source project credible. They are doing so today, and already have roughly a dozen projects posted on the Ingres site. One of the projects going forward is a Unicode version, which will allow OpenROAD to be used in China, a move that will allow Ingres to test the waters there for eventual more formal entry.

Going forward, Ingres will take the now familiar two-pronged open source business model made popular by Red Hat, where you have the commercially-supported distro, with the open source project being a separate fork whose features eventually trickle down to the commercial product. In this case, the open source branch of OpenROAD will be called the Empire Project (it's short for (Enhanced Multi-Platform Interpreted Runtime Engine).

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