Oracle buys Sleepycat Software

Oracle buys Sleepycat Software

Posted Feb 14, 2006 15:21 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: Oracle buys Sleepycat Software

If there *are* changes to the licensing terms, Berkeley DB is not such high-level rocket science that it's impossible to fork, or, even (in extremis) reimplement. Most of its more high-end features aren't used by 90% of the library's client programs anyway: the majority just want a keyword/value mapping and don't care about transactions and such things.

(Subversion might be discomfited, but Subversion had enough trouble with Berkeley DB that the FSFS backend has been recommended for some time now. If the worst comes to the worst, Subversion could just drop DB backend support and require a svnadmin dump/reload cycle for users of that backend.)

Oracle aren't idiots and doubtless know this, so it's a bit unlikely that the terms will change. (If they changed them, wouldn't they need permission from all the copyright holders anyway? Sleepycat didn't demand copyright assignments...)

What I *can* see happening is Oracle adding flashy new features (e.g., well, Oracle integration :) ) to a proprietary fork, but the license will let them do that anyway, and as most of the db's free clients don't need even the flashy features that it's got right now, it wouldn't even hurt much if they did so.

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