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Computer Associates' last month decided to sell Ingres (a database company with 10,000 customers) to two venture capitalists (see this sell Ingres article). Ingres has open sourced their product.

In a FOSS related comment (free open source software), the $10 billion database industry is dominated by 4 players: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase. Says Terry Garnett, the acting CEO of Ingres, as well as being the managing partner of Garnett & Helfrich Capital:

The systems are proprietary and expensive and leave customers with
virtually no way to get out from under. Meanwhile, the companies supplying those database products are looking at approximately an 80% profit margin.

Open source software is here to stay, and it's definitely going to take some huge mammoth sized chomps into high profit margin commoditizing industries. A few more snippets:

Garnett plans to increase the current staff with at least 100 new hires
worldwide. Ingres now has the ability to sweeten the compensation programs with
Ingres stock, though it will be at least several years before those shares
become tradable.

What about open source database competitors, such as MySQL?
According to Garnett, MySQL does not represent a threat, for two reasons. First,
the Ingres customer is often a large transaction-oriented firm, such as those on
Wall Street, as opposed to being more query-oriented. Transactions are Ingres's
forte.

MySQL may have gotten in a bit of a bind on the transaction side.
Oracle recently bought InnoDB, the development company behind what many
developers consider to be one of the most crucial pieces of technology in
MySQL's 5.0 release. Although InnoDB is only one of several storage engines that
ship with MySQL, if you want to do transactions with MySQL, InnoDB is an
important option. Garnett was adamant that Ingres had full ownership and control
over all of its code.

In summary, Garnett's team appears to be well qualified
to take Ingres to the next level. His company has the financial resources to see
the program through over the long run. And remember, Computer Associates
converted its software to run on Ingres. While Garnett's group owns more than
50%, Garnett said that Computer Associates also owns a "substantial" piece of
the company and as such wants to see Garnett's plans come to fruition.

Source: http://software.itmanagersjournal.com/software/05/12/02/2055247.shtml?tid=28