Oracle Buys Sleepycat

Oracle has acquired Sleepycat Software, an open-source database vendor, in an effort to bolster its presence in the embedded database market, the IDG News Service (IDGNS) reports via Computerworld.

The financial details of the deal have not been disclosed, according to the IDGNS.

The move represents an industry-wide acknowledgement that open source is an emerging–and thriving presence–in the enterprise software space, something many vendors have been less-than-anxious to accept.

Executive Editor Chris Koch calls Sleepycat a “mixed source” company that sells a proprietary version of an open-source database.  For more on mixed source, read Your Guide to Open-Source Business Models.

The acquisition of Sleepycat grows Oracle’s embedded database offering, which already includes a mobile device product called Oracle Lite, IDGNS reports.

Sleepycat provides commercial support for BerkeleyDB, a well-known embedded open-source database, that can be found in a number of popular open-source products like the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems and the Apache Web server, IDGNS reports.

Oracle claims that the acquisition provides users with access to a speedy, open-source database at a reasonable cost with “enterprise-class support,” according to IDGNS.

An article on Forbes.com discusses Oracle’s move with the CEO of MySQL, Marten Mickos.  MySQL is also in the open-source business, and is now an Oracle competitor.

As Mickos told Forbes, the bigshots like Alacatel, Google and Yahoo are all “realizing that open source is here to stay.  They can’t hide or avoid it.”

The true question behind the hype: Can the big vendors really “buy” open source?

Keep checking in over the next week at Koch’s IT Strategy blog for his take.

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