Ingres has announced an open source version of its OpenROAD platform development platform. Ingres OpenROAD is a rapid application development tool for quickly building and deploying sophisticated high-performance, high-availability applications on a variety of platforms, accessing a broad range of data sources. Once written, OpenROAD applications can be deployed on a variety of platforms without a single change.
Specifically, Ingres has open sourced the 4GL source for the OpenROAD Integrated Development Environment (IDE) component of the Ingres OpenROAD product. Ingres utilizes the GPL open source license for the project, which is live on the Ingres community web site.
"Ingres is committed to the open source business model because it exemplifies the importance of learning from each other," said Bill Maimone, senior vice president of worldwide engineering at Ingres. "We believe Ingres OpenROAD will foster a strong and collaborative community and we look forward to working with the various contributors. Collaboration is a key component. It is important to learn from each other's mistakes and successes. Open source allows programmers and developers an opportunity to build upon software, share wisdom, and advance the technology in a way that no other business model possibly can."
To foster a community around OpenROAD, Ingres has created a number of community tools to aid in the support of the open sourcing initiative, including LXR for source code viewing, bug tool for tracking and entering bugs, a community wiki for sharing information and to gather ideas on new projects.
