Computer Associates (CA) yesterday launched a $1m programming contest at LinuxWorld in an attempt to attract developers to its upcoming Ingres r3 open source database.

The Ingres Million Dollar Challenge will pay $400,000 for the best software application that allows users to migrate from an Oracle database to Ingres r3, and $300,000 for a tool that migrates away from IBM's DB2.

Migration tools for Microsoft's SQL Server, Informix, Sybase or MySQL will earn successful developers up to $100,000 per tool.

The contest is limited to residents of eight countries for legal reasons, the UK being the sole European representative.

The offer begins on 5 August, and submissions will be accepted until 1 February 2005. Five winners will be announced at CAWorld, CA's annual user conference in Orlando running from 17 to 21 April 2005.

Although CA could easily have developed the migration tools itself, the vendor uses the contest to attract outside developers to the database, according to Sam Greenblatt, chief architect at CA's Linux Technology Group. "This is about funding a community," he said.

CA has also disclosed the release of the Ingres source code, as it had promised to do last May.

The application will be released under the CA Trusted Open Source Licence, which ensures that the company retains ownership of the code. And theoretically CA could take the code back in the future.

The r3 version replaces the current r2.6 database and is scheduled to be available on Linux from 31 September.

It will incorporate several open source solutions, including the Oracle Clustered File System and IBM's Open Distributed Lock Manager, both of which support database clusters.