CA set for more open-source loving

Computer Associates is looking to the open-source community for help in building its next wave of management software.

The company will announce at its CA World user conference later this month a financial and development commitment to open source, said Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development.

"Open source is here to stay. We want to encourage innovation and we want to be able to leverage some of the components that are out there," he said. "We will be supporting a couple of open-source activities at a very large scale level, both financially and through packaging [with CA's products]."

Barrenechea, a former Oracle executive who joined Computer Associates last summer, wouldn't elaborate on the size of the company's financial investment or its particular focus in open source. But he said open-source code will play a role in the company's product development plans, especially in the area of systems management software.

The company may be hoping that announcements planned for CA World, 23 to 27 May, will help to deflect attention from its recent financial setbacks and management shake-up. Last month, Sanjay Kumar stepped down as the company's chief executive after a two-year investigation into the company's accounting practices. CA later restated more than $2bn in revenue from previous years.

Computer Associates is among a growing number of commercial software companies tapping into the open-source community's developer base. IBM has invested millions of dollars in the Linux operating system and its Eclipse open-source development tool project. Sun Microsystems has embraced the open-source model through its OpenOffice.org and NetBeans projects. Novell has embraced open source through its acquisition of SuSE. Even Microsoft has borrowed concepts from the open-source world to improve its developer relations programs and its Shared Source Initiative.

One big reason for the trend is cost: companies can offset some of their internal development expenses, and augment their research and development efforts, by using code and concepts already available in the open-source world.

Mike Ricciuti writes for ZDNet UK