Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

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.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers