Well, apparently I must not be alone in my disapproval of Ingres choosing GPL. I just noticed the following notice on the Ingres Licensing page:

Important Notice on GPL Licensing
Posted February 12, 2006
We have had significant feedback from many of you who would like to bundle access or include the Ingres access technologies (JDBC, ODBC, .Net, OpenAPI, ESQL etc.) with your non-GPL products, or link with these technologies, but are concerned about the viral aspects of the GPL.

We understand this important customer/partner requirement and are working to make this possible without limiting the needs of GPL partners and customers, or for end customers to get support.

I value this feedback from the Ingres community and the level of interest in using Ingres as an embedded or bundled database in applications as diverse as appliances, printers, and ERP solutions. Please check back in the next few days for an update on this topic.

To receive email updates on this topic, please email info@ingres.com with the subject GPL.
Dev Mukherjee
Chief Marketing Officer
Senior Vice President of Business Development

Hopefully this will be one of those cases where the community gives tough love, and it turns out in the best long term interest of the project. We’ll see!