Computer Associates has spun off its Ingres database into the privately held Ingres Corporation.
The newly formed company has received an investment from private equity fund Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which will be the firm's majority shareholder.
CA will provide the intellectual property rights for the database in exchange for a stake in the company.
Ingres Corporation aims to make money from the software as an open source project, providing services and maintenance.
Commercial open source projects are a hot area for venture capitalists. Numerous investors are seeking to copy Linux provider Red Hat's success by providing support for freely available software.
MySQL, SugarCRM and JBoss are among the more visible examples of commercial open source ventures.
The Ingres database no longer fitted into CA's strategy of systems and security management software for the enterprise, according to its chief executive John Swainson.
"This partnership with Garnett & Helfrich represents a step towards rationalising CA's solutions portfolio," he said.
Swainson added that he expects the database to perform better outside CA, allowing for more development focus and investment in its future.
Ingres grew as a commercial relational database out of a research project at the University of California in Berkeley in the early 1970s.
During the 1980s it became a serious threat to Oracle's and other enterprise databases, but in the end was beaten by more advanced competitors.
By the time CA acquired the software in 1994, Ingres was relying solely on its installed based for maintenance and update revenues.
CA tried to breathe new life into the application in 2004 when it released the software under the CA Trusted Open Source License.
Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with the Burton Group, told vnunet.com that he suspects that the open sourcing of Ingres had failed to attract sufficient external developers to allow the application to survive without support from the vendor.
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