The million-dollar challenge for IT whiz kids

Nothing motivates like money. $1 million to be precise. And Indian software programmers who believe in open source seem to be a highly motivated lot, if management software provider Computer Associates International Inc is to be believed.

CA in early August this year had announced the Ingress Million Dollar Challenge, a first in the history of the open source community, to leverage the global talent of open source developers, to develop migration tool kits for Ingres r3, which is the latest database platform offering from the company.

Under the terms of the offer, open source developers are invited to create solutions that enable users of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server, IBM DB2 Universal Database, Informix and/or MySQL to migrate to the Ingres r3 database platform. Solutions that pass muster will be eligible for cash awards of up to $400,000, with a total prize money on offer of $1 million.

The $1 million offer began on August 5 and submissions will be accepted until February 1, 2005.

Six winners will be announced at CAWorld, CA's annual user conference to be held between April 17 and 21, 2005, in Orlando, Florida. That's when we'll know if an Indian geek has hit the jackpot. -- BS

Software programmers at an IT office in Mumbai. Rediff file photo

Also see: The young super performers