Oracle Acquires Sleepycat

Deven writes "Computerworld is reporting that Oracle has just acquired Sleepycat Software (makers of the open-source Berkeley DB embedded database) for an undisclosed sum. Having previously acquired Innobase, Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity."

Re:Its not competition - Oh yes it is

[Snowhare]

BDB is used as a backend engine in MySQL. It is one of the two best backends - the other being InnoDB. Oddly enough, Oracle bought InnoDB about 3 months ago.

Sense a pattern?

Re:How will this affect BDB-using projects?

[jrockway]

Subversion was moving away from BDB in favor of fsfs anyway. The fact of the matter, though, is that BDB has all the features OpenLDAP and Subversion need... so even if SleepyCat doesn't release any more updates it doesn't really mean much to the individual projects. They can fork BDB and life will move on.

[bdbxml-ann] Oracle acquires Sleepycat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pleased to announce today that Sleepycat Software has been acquired by
Oracle.

By joining the leading database company in the world, I expect that we
will be able to serve our customers and the open source community better.
With the additional expertise, resources and reach of Oracle, we'll be
able to accelerate innovation, offer you greater choice, and provide more
complete solutions. For Oracle, we fill a gap in the product portfolio
for high performance embedded/edge databases, an area which we believe is
a significant and growing opportunity.

I assure you that we will continue to deliver the products and services
that you are used to receiving from Sleepycat Software. We plan to
continue developing, supporting and selling the entire family of Berkeley
DB products, including our XML and Java Editions. There are no plans to
change our dual license model, and we will continue to serve both open
source and commercial users. Oracle will honor the terms and conditions
of existing Sleepycat agreements.

All of your contacts, phone numbers and email addresses for Sleepycat
Sales and Customer Support remain the same. In fact, 100% of Sleepycat's
employees are expected to transition to Oracle, so we retain all our deep
technical expertise and community relationships. We look forward to
working with you as part of Oracle!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at
[e-mail].

Regards,
Mike Olson
Vice President, Oracle
Former President and CEO
Sleepycat Software

Re:Interesting ....

[jadavis]

How many of those engines are distributed under a free license and have transactional support? Looks like both are owned by Oracle now. Oracle did that for a reason, and it's not because they like to collect database companies.

Many users of MySQL depend on one or more of:
(1) the ability to license MySQL commercially with one of those engines cheaply
(2) the continued development of those storage engines
(3) the continued development of MySQL

Oracle can now stronly influence all of those things. #1 they can just raise the price or not license. #2 they can just lay off all the developers. Good luck getting an open sources devel team together before it's too late. #3, they can just refuse to license those backends, thereby preventing #1, which is also MySQL's source of revenue, leading indirectly to exactly the same case as #2.

Re:Its not competition

[ZeekWatson]

Only DB1 is open in a way that is useful to commercial software vendors (ie the folks at Mysql). DB1 is BSD licensed while DB[2-4] are licensed under the Sleepycat license which is only free for GPL software (basically).

While mysql (the db) is GPL'd, it is also proprietary. Mysql (the commercial entity) has to abide by the Sleepycat license if they distribute private versions of the server, so Oracle purchasing Sleepycat has a chilling effect on Mysql (the commercial entity) and the DBD backend.

Re:Two MySQL backends owned by Oracle

[dickko]

The way I understand it, the GPL kicks in anytime copyright law would, i.e., when you copy it and it's not covered by fair use. And copying windows 100 times in an office certainly isn't legally fair use.

You can't copy windows 100 times because of a little item in the EULA:

1. GRANT OF LICENSE. Manufacturer grants you the following rights provided that you comply with all terms and conditions of this EULA: 1.1 Installation and use. You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the SOFTWARE on the COMPUTER. The SOFTWARE may not be used by more than two (2) processors at any one time on the COMPUTER, unless a higher number is indicated on the COA.

You'll not see anything like the above in the GPL. In fact under "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION":

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The GPL is a "distribution" license (don't know if that is an official term, I've just seen it used here before), it doesn't care how you use the code, so long that any publicly available derivation includes access to the source code

Sleepycat responds

[Chairman]

I'm Mike Olson, Sleepycat's (now former!) CEO. I've taken a job as VP at Oracle working on embedded databases. Our entire team has come along.

I've posted a summary of this announcement on the Sleepycat blog, at http://blog.sleepycat.com/2006/02/next-ten-years.h tml [sleepycat.com]. I understand that a big vendor making a series of acquisitions in open source causes concern, but I'm convinced that the plan is as outlined in my posting. We're all showing up for work every day and working on the same embeddable database technology as ever. We're continuing to close deals with new customers and to support old ones. We continue to work closely with open source users.

There's lots of speculation that this move is intended to damage MySQL. I frankly don't see it; MySQL doesn't depend on Berkeley DB. It never did. We've always had a close and cordial relationship with those guys, but both businesses have always concentrated on our own customers and markets. We may have wished, sometimes, that we collaborated more closely, but we never did.

We've been good members of the open source community for a long, long time. We're pleased our software is so broadly used, and we're proud of the projects that rely on it. While I understand the concern, here, I'd ask that you watch what we do. I'm confident in the future of our products and of open source. Give us time to show you what Oracle and Sleepycat can do together.

Re:Berkeley - OID?

[buchanmilne]

Oracle can replace OpenLDAP, as OID

I would say Oracle has an LDAP server, that's not very standards compliant, and that they may try and convince people can replace OpenLDAP. Whether OID really can is another matter. Performance-wise, apparently it can't.

BTW, OpenLDAP isn't the only LDAP server that uses Berkeley DB on the backend, FDS/RHDS (the copy of Netscape Directory Server RedHat bought) and JES (Sun's copy of Netscape Directory server they got via the iPlanet alliance) do too.

But what's it like to replace only the BerkeleyDB with Oracle, under an OpenLDAP server?

Just like replacing any fast local database backend (bdb) with another abstraction (SQL) to a model (tables) that doesn't represent the frontend (hierarchical) that well, really bad for performance. OpenLDAP can already use any ODBC/SQL backend, though it's really not the first choice (the only real use is to expose data already in such a database via LDAP, not as a high performance LDAP server). Oracle, DB2, Postgresql, and MySQL have been used successfully (ie it works, but performance is always bad, no matter which is used).

And what's it like to then drop the OpenLDAP part, leaving only OID?

Slow and expensive?

Re:Sleepycat responds

[hypersql]

I don't agree MySQL does not depend on Berkeley DB. Without it, and without InnoDB, MySQL needs an alternative. In any case it's bad for MySQL, because some customers are probably already scared.

I think what Oracle will do is change the work priorities inside Sleepycat. Development and support related to MySQL will be stopped completely. Developers will be re-assigned to do things like 'compatibility', 'migration' and so on. Future version of Sleepycat will just not work with MySQL any more. Probably the license agreement will change. Not sure if the code will be forked, but if the main developers of the codebase are gone (no longer working on it), the code becomes a legacy.

Something very similar happened to me in 2001. I am the original author of Hypersonic SQL (a Java database engine). PointBase, who also developed a Java SQL database, asked me if I want to work for them, I said yes. We agreed I will continue to work on Hypersonic SQL. But this suddenly changed about half a year later, and they made me to work on something else (PointBase Micro, PointBase UniSync). So they 'bought' me (well, I only got shares, which are now worthless). And then tried to kill the competitor. They told me to stop the Hypersonic SQL project. But it was forked (HSQLDB). I left PointBase in 2003, and now I'm working on a new Java database: H2 (http://www.h2database.com/ [h2database.com]).

MySQL will probably start developing their own transactional backend. They have now enough money to do that. They should do that, probably they already started (I was asked to work for them, but obviously I said no because of H2). My guess is MySQL will start a branch in the Bay Area, and hire some good developers there. There are quite a lot good database developers in this region.

Thomas Mueller, former author of Hypersonic SQL

Re:Interesting ....

[killjoe]

In order for the GPL to kick in two things have to happen.

1) You have to modify the code.
2) You have to distribute the code.

How many corporations have interest in modifying the code of berkleydb or innodb? Unless you make databases for a living I don't see why any corporation would even want to look at the code.

Re:Interesting ....

[Trepalium]

Where did you get this $500/client figure? They certainly charge $600/server. There are plenty of things to criticise MySQL over without making stuff up.

Re:Taking a look at Diversity?

[Deven]

Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me.

I should point out that the Slashdot editor changed my words while leaving them attributed to me.

I said nothing about diversity. My original quote was "Having previously [oracle.com] acquired Innobase, what does the future hold for these open-source databases?" The editor changed the end of the sentence to "Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity." -- those weren't my words, despite remaining inside the quotes.

But hey, I got a submission accepted, and that's always nice! :-)

Re:PotgreSQL...

[Nohea]

I think most PostgreSQL users checked out MySQL in the late 90's, and read the MySQL docs, to see if referential integrity was supported (i know i did).

Not only did they say it was not supported, but that it would be stupid to implement it in the database, and that application developers should write their own code to do constraints.

Well, the message was pretty clear to me - never give MySQL another consideration. Unless you want to do repetitive coding the rest of your life.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=104 831&cid=8925689 [slashdot.org]
http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/textbooks/mysql/manual .html#Broken_Foreign_KEY [univie.ac.at]

Re:Worrying

[yomahz]

First they bought out InnoBase, now SleepyCat, and it looks like probably JBoss soon..

Is Oracle/Ellison attemping to simply buy out a good sized chunk of the mature open source offerings? For what purpose I wonder? To stop (or slow down) their competition with Oracle's own products? To use them against Microsoft and/or IBM?

At any rate, I don't like it, not one bit

I'm pretty worried about the JBoss move [eweek.com]. I can't imagine Oracle has more than two motives here:

1) Compete with IBM in the smaller, free [ibm.com] application server market.

2) Get rid of their open source competition.

I have a hunch that #2 is much more likely. Jboss doesn't just have a competing applicaion server, it also has a competing ORM framekwork (Toplink vs Hibernate).