In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts (database)Code in Public Domain

[papau]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/03/technology/03java.html

In Competitive Move, I.B.M. Puts Code in Public Domain
By STEVE LOHR

.B.M. plans to announce today that it is contributing more than half a million lines of its software code, valued at $85 million, to an open source software group.

The move is one of the largest transfers ever of proprietary code to free software, and I.B.M. is making the code contribution to try to help make it easier and more appealing for software developers to write applications in the Java programming language.<snip>

I.B.M. is handing over the code for Cloudscape, a database written in Java, to an open source group, the Apache Software Foundation. Within the open source group, the database will be called Derby.<snip>

Apache will hold the licensing and intellectual property rights to the Cloudscape code. By transferring its technology into the public domain, Janet Perna, general manager for data management software at I.B.M., said, "We hope to spur the further development of the Java community." <snip>

Placing software into the open source realm does not guarantee that it will succeed in attracting programmers to maintain and improve the code. Still, Java experts say that there is a need for a basic Java database and that the Cloudscape code could prove to be popular. "It is a nice, out-of-the-box database," said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Foundation.<snip>

[GAspnes]

1. download here

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0408cline/index.html

IBM gives away an amazing amount of their software, especially in 'developer/one-user' sizes.

This is another cool move on IBM's part because Cloudscape as they are releasing it supports DB/2 SQL syntax, making upmigration to profit-producing products likely later on.