Oracle and Sleepycat
As everyone knows, Oracle bought Sleepycat. I was a little surprised by Sleepycat taking expo space at ApacheCon – now all is explained.
But the interesting question for me is this: will Oracle close BDB or just drop it? Because I find it impossible to believe that Oracle’s business model includes “give away high quality embeddable database software for free”.
In either case there will be a fork, of course – and luckily BDB has a license that is pretty good for forking: it is essentially BSD with a clause added requiring that source is made available if redistributed. Unlike the GPL it isn’t viral – but unfortunately the source requirement makes it incompatible with the Apache License. Somehow I can’t quite see Oracle fixing that!
I wonder how long before the fork happens?