Ingres gains geospatial features &mdash and loses its last closed code

Ingres has announced geospatial support in its open source database, allowing it to be used as part of a Geographic Information System (GIS). Or rather, it's announced an open source implementation of its geospatial support, since the functions have been there for quite some time. However, until this point, the modules were proprietary — the only part of Ingres that was.

Ingres started life as open source software, having been created at Berkeley in the 70s when they were producing all sorts of useful software and making it freely avaialble. Since then all sorts of people have taken advantage, including open source and proprietary database systems. The current Ingres Corporation was a commercial spin-off producing a version for DEC VAX computers, which was then bought by Computer Associates (as was), and eventually re-spun off, and made open source again.

There's also been a separate open source fork, PostgreSQL, which has competed with MySQL for the open source database crown for years. PostgreSQL has had a geospatial extension, called PostGIS, for quite a while now. Ingres hasn't chosen to back-port PostGIS to its own codebase, but has taken advantage of open source geospatial software from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo for short. It's also written some of its own code for release under the GPL.

You could question whether joining forces with the team behind PostGIS would have been a more efficient way of working, but I think they've done the right thing. You don't have to work side-by-side to share code or algorithms, and trying to make one codebase fit two separate projects would probably end in failure. As long as there aren't licensing issues — and I can't see any from here — the two projects can share code where they want to, and go their separate ways where it suits them.