A funny thing has happened to the computer industry over the last few years. The traditional wisdom was that there were two types of companies. At one extreme, there were small, fast startups that could maneuver nimbly and rapidly gain market share. On the other end of the spectrum were old, established, conservative companies that slowly faded into extinction or irrelevance as they lost track of what the market wanted.

Reality seems to bear out that wisdom. Digital failed to adapt to an Intel-based hardware transition and ended up being gobbled by Compaq, a relative newcomer. IBM spent a lot of the '80s and early '90s being counted out as a serious market innovator. And then, that funny thing happened. One morning we woke up to see a large number of those hot, new, innovative companies washed up on the rocky shores of the stock market bust, and some of the "fuddy-duddy" old-school companies suddenly making major plays in the new technologies.

Computer Associates has spent most of its history being viewed as the kind of company that infiltrates the Fortune 500, profitable but definitely not cool. They had a portfolio of proprietary solutions that they had either engineered or acquired through an aggressive and long history of corporate buyouts. It was one of those companies that, unless you were in one of their market segments, you might know of as a name, but not much more. Very much the Cathedral, not at all the Bazaar (as in Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar). But behind the scenes, a shift was occurring in their corporate philosophy.

That change began to occur as CA customers began to see Linux as a viable platform, and it started to show up on the radar of people like Sam Greenblatt, a senior vice president and chief architect at CA. Greenblatt singles out financial giant Smith Barney as a customer who helped drive CA's movement toward Linux, when they decided to transition their trading platform to Linux in 1998.

"What happened was when CA first came up to Linux, it looked at Linux as another flavor of Unix," says Greenblatt. "And it was going to port the traditional applications over to it and give you the tools that were needed to manage that type of environment. We started to realize, as we got more and more into the open source of the Linux world, that Linux was taking on a different type of persona than the Unix environment did - in a sense of the horizontal versus vertical scaling, in the sense that we actually started to believe Eric Raymond's stuff on the cathedral and the bazaar, that we were getting incredibly high-quality code from the community. And as we saw that, we saw an opportunity to really extend our development pool to the open community by using open source to extend our products."

What began with Greenblatt picked up momentum when CA brought in Mark Barrenechea, already a senior VP at Oracle, to head up product development. At Oracle Barrenechea had already begun to see how Linux could totally change things. "You know, there's a couple of magical things about Linux, one of which is Linux and Intel. The Lintel combination provides the kind of price-performance that is unparalleled on any other platform. Oracle, as we all can see today, has now bet the farm on Linux with 10g plus their file system and RAC (Real Application Clusters) support. It became very obvious back in the Oracle days that Linux plus Intel broke the chains of big iron - that you could get a price-performance ratio for your applications and your data servers that broke the bonds of big iron."

When Barrenechea arrived, he was pleased to see that CA already was on the right road. "It was refreshing to see folks like Sam for whom there was no education necessary - it was already in the DNA - that Linux is not just a platform; it's transformational." Working together, Mark and Sam have brought CA into the middle of the open source community.

CA has begun to closely examine ways that open source can be embedded into CA's existing and developing product lines, to leverage the power of the masses and the high quality they have been finding in open source products. But CA's commitment to the new open source philosophy has moved beyond being a consumer to being an active contributor. According to Greenblatt, CA has released over 100,000 lines of code back into the open source arena, including an entire product that had to be released under the GNU Public License (GPL, www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) after it was discovered that it used a GPL-licensed package.

CA has made some significant contributions to the 2.6 kernel to enable third-party software to be notified of events occurring inside the kernel. They also fixed some bugs in IBM's Open Distributed Lock Manager, which they ran across doing development work with the Ingres database server, to which CA now holds the rights.

Ingres represents a new tack for CA, a dual-licensed technology. In a move sure to spur increased competition with MySQL and Postgres, CA is going to make up to 10 user Ingres installations totally free. As well as ratcheting up to pressure of the open source database vendors, it will also be a shot across the bow of Oracle.

Barrenechea thinks the latest version of Ingres will open a lot of eyes. "On top of Ingres we've also gotten Python adaptors to work. We've gotten Xerces to work. JBoss and Apache work against it. We support Eclipse going in for an IDE. So it's very open source friendly and very Java friendly. We're calling it Ingres R3: Fast and Free. And when we get to CA World, we'll be showing some of the TCP-H and TCP-C benchmarks (www.tpc.org). All I can say is no one's going to believe how fast we are."

Barrenechea also hints that there will be other major open source announcements at CA World, ones sure to set a few companies back on their heels. In the meantime, CA is also changing the way they develop in house. "We obviously have a lot of engineering projects going on. We used to release first on Windows and then move to other platforms. We now co-release on Windows and Linux. That's one of the big changes we've made over the last 10 months. Every new developer that joins CA gets a Linux desktop. Our developers build, test, and release on Linux and Windows."

CA is also changing their underlying technology toolkit. "We're moving away from .NET- and Win32-based clients to HTML and Java-based clients. You know, in some cases very thin clients are appropriate; in other cases you need to do more with Java. We're a fan of Struts and JavaServer Faces and Eclipse as an IDE in building what we do. So, you know, we're now building our software to run on any client because of HTML and Java. And our back ends simultaneously support Windows and Linux." Barrenechea sums it up simply, "I love building it once and having it run everywhere."

The benefits for CA reach beyond a wider platform base for their customers. "We're now running our source code control system on Linux, on Ingres with our application called Harvest. And our developers all over the globe, from Israel to Germany to the United Kingdom to the United States to China to Australia and India, all come to a single set of services in Islandia to check in and check out, do their builds...write their software in a set of Linux clusters. And it's been a phenomenal transformation. And now that we've gone from a federated model to a centralized model, it runs faster. You know, when we were checking out source code running on other source code control systems in Islandia to India, it used to take us four to five minutes to do a typical checkout. Checkout now runs in eight seconds."

Embracing the open source model does come with a danger for CA. With everyone running on a common, nonproprietary substrate, the race will be won by the companies with the best developers and architectural vision, rather than those that lock a customer base into a proprietary solution. Barrenechea sees this as a positive force for CA, rather than a threat. "You know, NAFTA, when created, brought certain jobs into other markets that American workers had to become more skilled in, or not be competitive. So one of the aspects of open source is that companies like CA need to innovate and become better at what they do. It puts a little pressure on our innovation and ability to add value. It creates useful tools and software in the marketplace. And that NAFTA-like effect will make the strong survive and the weak die. I've always pointed to innovation as the way to make you go from better to best, so I don't fear it at all. We're embracing it. It's challenging our developers to go from better to best. And I'm encouraged to see where this is going."

Hopefully, Computer Associates can remain focused on their transition to open source and Linux in spite of a recent accounting scandal that has rocked the high-level management of the company, causing CEO Sanjay Kumar to step down and resign from the board of directors, as well as launching investigations by both the SEC and the Department of Justice. Barrenechea, who features portraits of both Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in his office, may be just the man for the job.