Introducing Ingres licensing
Below is an excerpt explaining the difference between Open Source edition and Enterprise edition.
"Ingres open source products are available in two editions: The Community Edition: For organisations that want to take the 'traditional' open source route, Ingres is available free of charge from our website under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 (GPL2).
The user receives the source code and is at liberty to change the product as they wish. Under the terms of the GPL2 license, any derived work built using Ingres must also be made open source.
There is no formal support available from Ingres Corporation for the Community Edition of the product. Users rely on their own resources, or a member of the Ingres community to resolve any problems. Note that while Ingres freely contributes to its Community Editions products, Ingres does not certify them, and they have not gone through a rigorous set of testing by the Ingres Quality Assurance group.
Enterprise Edition: For organisations running business critical applications, or ISVs who would find the GPL2 license restricting, Ingres offers the Enterprise (or Business Open Source) Edition. As with the Community Edition, there is no up-front license fee to use the product. Instead, customers pay a fixed annual subscription that covers usage, maintenance, support and indemnification. As a result, the total cost of ownership is significantly less in the long term than more traditional closed source products. The subscription model eliminates large capital expenditure costs associated with upfront license fees in the closed source model and so makes budgeting much easier. The indemnification clause protects users in the unlikely event that any 3rd party I.P. infringement should take place.
A valid subscription agreement entitles customers to 24x7x365 follow-the-sun support directly from the Ingres engineering team which has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry. In addition, regular code updates and patches are also included. These updates will have been through our rigorous testing and quality assurance procedures.
Annual maintenance and support subscription charges are on a per CPU Basis. Multiple core processors in one socket are charged as a single CPU. Usage is therefore limited only by the capability of the server machine, with no additional client access license fees or internet usage fees. Inefficient lock-in models commonly associated with proprietary software vendors are therefore avoided. Subscriptions can increase or decrease year on year as they are geared directly to usage."