I am not concerned about Sleepycat revoking their open source license for future versions of BDB. I am less concerned about them revoking licenses for current and older releases. That would be impossible. However this "deal" troubles me and I cant quite put my finger on why. I'll try to tease it out. Please bear with me. As I understand it Sleepycat make most of their money by selling commercial licenses to companies who use their stuff but who don't want to open source their own code. Companies such as these will in the future be required to talk to Oracle to negotiate a new license. So far nothing sinister about this. However, I see MySQL as the future losers here. I cannot see why else Oracle would buy both of the MySQL storage engines other than to effectively remove both of them from the MySLQ product suite in future releases, thereby weakening it. Im just wondering how they are going to achieve it though. According to Olson, BDB will still be available under the dual license. Lets assume for the moment that at least the open source license will still be available. Happy days, unless of course the product you own is called "MySQL". Do MySQL or any MySQL customers need a commercial license for BDB? I think not. MySQL does not as all its code is open source. As for MySQL customers, unless they are making direct API calls into BDB (which most don't) I don't think they are categorized as BDB Api users and so can keep their code proprietary without having to answer to Sleepycat/Oracle for a commercial license. Therefore I see only the following mechanisms for Oracle to remove BDB from MySQL 1. Discontinue BDB 2. "Change their mind" about free licensing and start charging exorbidant fees for use of BDB, regardless of the type of application 3. And I feel if 1 and 2 do not happen then this is the highly probably: use a non-compete clause in the BDB license to effectively prevent companies like MySQL ever licensing BDB again. Sleepycat have a similar clause in their own license to prevent companies releasing products using BDB which could be seen to compete with Sleepycat. This clause will change to refer to Oracle instead of Sleepycat. I hasten to add this non-compete clause only refers to non-open source applications today. This will signal the end of relationship between MySQL and BDB. Question is: can they put non-compete clauses into open source licenses? I dont think so. Maybe Oracle will just proceed with step 2, first. Either way there is no way Oracle will allow to continue the situation where MySQL gets to use BDB, a world class storage engine for FREE, as they happily steal customers from Oracle the very company that now owns said engine. As of today I consider myself to be an EX-Berkeley DB user/developer. What we need now is an open source DB with clean APIs into various places in the software stack (eg we need a Berkeley DB kind of API under the hood into something like Postgres) A full bells and whistles relational DB with these low level ACCESS APIs will be a powerfull thing in the future. PostgreSQL take note. If you don't already have it you should begin exposing such a thing today in my humble opinion. Being part of a big company changes you. This deal may stifle innovation in BDB going forward. If so there is an opportunity to fill that gap. I turn to the PostgreSQL community to rise to the challenge.
