Press Release
INGRES JOINS UNIVERSITIES TO SUPPORT STUDENTS IN OPEN SOURCE
Academic Collaboration Encourages and Helps Students Participate in Open Source Projects
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and PARIS - October 20, 2009 - Open source can open doors for college students looking to gain expertise and experience to prepare for the full-time job hunt that comes after graduation. That’s why Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today that the company is actively supporting university and open source organization initiatives to promote students in open source. Ingres is sponsoring a program between three universities in Canada and the United States to offer course credit to seven students that are participating in a semester long project working on Ingres Database, the leading open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost.
"The collaboration between Ingres and leading universities to help students begin working with open source has offered major benefits to students," said Greg Wilson, assistant professor of computer science, University of Toronto. "Financial support has allowed us to bring students from different universities in North America together face-to-face and offer them projects and mentors for the students to work with. Furthermore, as an open source company, Ingres gives students the opportunity to not only add to the project, but also to dive in and see how the database really works."
Universities participating in the project are Michigan State University, The University of Toronto, and The University of the Virgin Islands.
"Academic collaboration is one of the best ways to foster innovation," said Deb Woods, vice president of product management, Ingres. "Ingres started off as an academic project and has come full circle, now giving back to academia. By supporting open source collaboration at the university level, we hope to help students gain a better understanding of the types of projects and challenges they will be facing after graduation. It also gives students a great head-start into the open source environment."
Students are working with Ingres on a project to create an easy-to-use interface for managing Geospatial Data. The project will focus on testing a Drupal plug-in for OpenLayers and fixing bugs using Ingres as the backend database, providing SQL standards and support for geospatial data types and functions.
"The geospatial project offers students the opportunity to work on real code that other people will use and gives the students a sense of pride outside of their schoolwork," continued Wilson. "Open source also gives the students access to a vast network of developers for assistance, so they come out of the program much better trained and with a sense of being part of the broader community of programmers."
Ingres and universities have worked closely before, resulting in a number of positive projects:
Ingres CAFÉ - Ingres CAFÉ is an open source bundle that puts the Eclipse IDE, Ingres DBMS, Apache Tomcat, Hibernate and JSF libraries into a single installable package, including integrated maintenance. The bundle was a project spearheaded by a graduate student at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada and was awarded a 2008 LinuxWorld Product Excellence Award for Best Application Development Tool.
Ingres VectorWise - VectorWise is a spin out of the leading database research team of the renowned CWI Institute of Amsterdam. VectorWise is engaged in open innovation through research collaborations around the VectorWise engine with CWI and various other top academic research groups.
Global Ingres University Alliances - Ingres holds active alliances to drive open source innovation with world class universities including: Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; Ilmenau University in Germany; and Warwick University in the UK.
Google Summer of Code - Ingres has been a participant in Google’s Summer of Code, where a collection of students worked with Ingres mentors on a number of projects including the production of Linux and Mac OSX versions of Ingres CAFÉ.
Open Source Boot Camp - Established by Ingres and Carleton University, the goal of this program is to work with other open source communities and projects to introduce university college students and staff to the concepts and realities of open source.
If you are interested in joining the Ingres community and offering support to students, please join our community at http://community.ingres.com/ or download Ingres Database 9.3 and get started contributing today at http://esd.ingres.com/product/Ingres_Database/9.3.
About Ingres Corporation
Ingres is a leading open source database management company. We are one of the largest open source companies in the world and the pioneer of the New Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at a dramatically reduced cost compared with proprietary software vendors. As a leader in the New Economics of IT, Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to more than 10,000 customers worldwide.
Ingres is a registered trademark of Ingres Corporation. All other trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.