Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 01:29:32PM -0800, Chris Travers wrote:
> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 10 Feb 2006, Gavin M. Roy wrote:
> >
> >>The Sleepycat purchase seems to be more of the no-brainer boxing
> >>MySQL into a corner.
> >
> >
> >I'm not so much worried about MySQL as the other OSS that have used
> >Berkeley DB as its backend ... stuff like Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, Cyrus
> >SASL and sendmail come immediately to mind ... what 'alternatives' do
> >they have? I know in my case, we have PostgreSQL backing a large
> >portion of the stuff for Postfix/IMAP/SASL, but not everything has
> >been extended to allow for 'alternate backends' ... of course, nothing
> >really prevents that from happening if backed into a corner, but it
> >does create for potential disruption in the overall OSS community ;(
> >
> But these don't have the problems that MySQL does. They can stay with
> older versions, build a community to fork BDB under a similar OSS-only
> license, etc.
>
> MySQL doesn't have that luxury because they have opted to go the
> dual-licensing way. In essence they are dependant on commercial
> agreements with Sleepycate, InnoDB, etc. to offer functionality to
> customers using their software with non-Free code.
>
> MySQL could still re-release the client libs LGPL of course and that
> might get them out of it but that would be a painful transition.

Just in case anyone hasn't heard; MySQL bought 2 folks from Firebird:
http://firebird.sourceforge.net/
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461