[Info-ingres] Ingres GPL'd for commercial purposes

[Roy Hann]

nikosv wrote:

> Potential client asks if he can use Ingres open source GPL'd
> edition for commercial purposes and his infrastructure.

As others have pointed out, he can do that. And if he wants to sell a
product that uses it he needs to understand the viral nature of the GPL
but even that is allowed.

> If that is so,what does a license from Ingres buy him?

It would get him Ingres 11.1, or better still, Actian X. It would get
him 24x7 support including bug-fixes. It would get him a load more
geospatial types; window functions; string distance functions; far
more versatile session tracing, a JDBC 4.3 driver, and stuff I'm
sure I've forgotten.

But let me speak up for the GPL version too. First off it may be old and
it may be frozen in time, but it is actually pretty stable and far more
capable than a lot of open source SQL DBMS products. If he expects more
from his DBMS than a kind of "grep with a complicated interface"--which
seems to be all that a lot of developers expect (or want), the price
might be right.

I have built GPL Ingres on several platforms including (Goodness help
me) Windows. Once you can build it you can provide some self-help. It
won't be an efficient use of time to do that but you won't be totally
stuck either.

But finally, just this very week I have been working with a company that
built a system on GPL Ingres 10 and now that it's working they are ready
to buy a fully supported GA version of Ingres for production. So GPL
Ingres has a place even today.

Roy