Sleepycat Software

» see sleepycat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sleepycat Software was the company behind Berkeley DB, a database with no server and no query language. It was a library. A program linked it in and handed it keys and values, which came back quickly and safely from a file on disk. Most people who depended on it never learned its name, because it arrived inside something else.

The code came out of the BSD Unix project at Berkeley. After 4.3BSD the developers were replacing everything that still belonged to AT&T, and the old dbm package was on the list. Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic wrote a hash table that outperformed it, released in 1991 and shipped with 4.4BSD. In 1996 Netscape asked the authors to extend the library, then at version 1.86, for its LDAP directory server and for the browser. Seltzer and Bostic, who were married, founded a company to do the work, and Michael Olson, another of the original authors, became its president and CEO.

Sleepycat started in Carlisle, Massachusetts, and moved to nearby Lincoln in 2000. Across ten years it took Berkeley DB from a simple key store to a transactional engine with replication, and it added a pure Java edition and an XML layer along the way. Wikipedia records that it was profitable during its entire existence.

~ the record ~

~ two licenses, one library ~

The business model is the part that lasted. Berkeley DB shipped under the Sleepycat License, which let anyone use and redistribute it as long as the application linking it was released as open source too. A vendor who wanted to keep its own code closed bought a commercial license for the same library. Bostic's Wikipedia entry calls Sleepycat the first company to build on dual licensing, years before MySQL AB did the same at larger scale.

This is software a computer engineer uses for a long time before hearing what it is called. It sat under Subversion repositories and OpenLDAP directories, and mail servers such as Sendmail kept their lookup tables in it. When Oracle announced the deal it named Linux and the Apache web server among the projects that embedded the library, and put the number of deployments above 200 million.

~ the valentine's day deal ~

Oracle announced the purchase from Redwood Shores on 14 February 2006 and did not disclose the terms. Berkeley DB joined an embedded product line beside Oracle Lite and TimesTen. "We're very excited to join the world's largest enterprise software company," Olson said in the release, which described the dual license in the present tense and announced no change to it. The Sleepycat name was not kept, and sleepycat.com forwards to an Oracle database page today.

The timing drew more comment than the product. Four months earlier Oracle had bought Innobase, the Finnish maker of InnoDB, and both companies supplied transactional storage engines to MySQL. A commenter on LWN counted that Oracle now controlled two of the three transactional backends in MySQL. The same thread passed on rumors that JBoss and Zend were next.

~ what oracle did with it ~

For seven years very little changed. Then on 10 June 2013 Oracle released Berkeley DB 6.0 under the GNU AGPL in place of the Sleepycat License, which meant that software linking the new version had to be AGPL-compatible as well. Debian worked out that its own package manager would need relicensing and chose to stay on 5.3 while projects moved to alternatives such as LMDB. Debian developer Ondřej Surý put the objection this way: "The evil thing is the relicensing at the point where people depend on you, and not the license itself."

Bitcoin had moved its block index off Berkeley DB that same spring. In March 2013 the chain split for some hours, because older nodes ran out of database locks on a large block that the new LevelDB nodes accepted.

The founders had moved on by then. Olson co-founded Cloudera in 2008. Bostic left Oracle the same year and in 2010 co-founded another storage engine company, WiredTiger, which MongoDB bought in 2014, while Seltzer kept teaching computer science, at Harvard and later at the University of British Columbia.

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