The news that Computer Associates is to make Ingres open source, could have interesting implications for UpFront.

To teach a brief history lesson, UpFront came about when Alex technologies decided to try and put a GUI front end onto Ingres ABF. It was quickly discovered that a protocol was already built into ABF to do this. It was call the Mac Work Station, MWS protocol and worked with a Mac product.

So UpFront was born, using this same protocol, but taking the idea and running with it, so that you could edit screens.

This was done in partnership with Ingres and now in partnership with Computer Associates. The partnership was essential as Computer Associates could have pulled the plug on the protocol, and would regardless have to fix it, if bugs were found.

Initially quite a few bugs were found, and we partnered with CA, to resolve the bugs and indeed to enhance the protocol.

However CA  have many other fish to fry in the database arena, and it has been some time since it was possible to ask them to further enhance the Ingres server for UpFront.

The advent of Open Source Ingres does now make this a potential possibity once again.