Computer Associates wants to boost its open source credentials with a series of partnerships, and by releasing its Ingres relational database source code under a new open source licence.

CA will release Ingres under its new CA-Trusted Open Source Licence (CA-TOSL). Under the terms of CA-TOSL, independent software vendors can incorporate Ingres into products as long as the Ingres source code is provided with them.

The company will also release Kernel Generalised Event Management source code, which allows management applications to work with Linux in a standardised way. CA hopes the technology will feature in the 2.68 Linux kernel release.

CA is also working with open source federation JBoss to produce high-performance relational storage software in conjunction with J2EE-based application servers.

It is currently developing open source content management software with open source application server Zope, and the Plone Foundation which develops an open source content management system.

Robin Bloor, chairman and research director at analyst Baroudi Bloor, said in a statement: "Open source has already brought immense changes to the IT market with Linux, Apache and Tomcat.

"CA's move means that mission-critical database and content management are now also likely to be driven by open source."

CA and JBoss plan to combine JBoss Application server, JBoss Hibernate and Ingres to create a platform for J2EE and Java apps that include object persistence, cache, replication, transactional integrity and security features.

The pair will collaborate on certification and marketing of the platform. CA will offer first-line support, JBoss second-line support.

CA has also introduced a BrightStor Document Manager product that incorporates the Plone document management engine for the Information Lifecycle Management market.

Zope and CA plan to produce open source content management software compatible with relational database technology. The two firms plan to build an open source Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) persistence module by the end of the year.

"The development of RDBMS-based storage for Zope is the first of many planned collaborations," said Sam Greenblatt, chief architect at CA's Linux technology group.

Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of product development at CA, added: "As storage and information requirements increase, Ingres and Plone will set the standard for structured and unstructured data management."