dbXML Open Source ... again

Tom Bradford just announced that he is re-releasing the dbXML source code under a GPL license. At this point dbXML has a long and pretty confusing history. I'll try to explain it, maybe it will help, maybe not.

First we need to be clear, this is not the same product as Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML, dbXML (note the lower case db and no space) is much older then Berkeley DB XML and has no relationship to Sleepycat's product. It was originally started by Tom roughly four years ago or maybe a little longer. Shortly after he got started, I joined up with him as the CTO for the company Tom formed to commercialize dbXML, the dbXML Group. We were taking an open source strategy for the company and released the dbXML Core under an LGPL license. I believe the code was first released in Sept. of 2000. The original plan was to build more advanced versions of the software that were purely commercial while keeping the Core open source. We worked on this for a couple years, but in the end it didn't work out as well as we had hoped and the company went into suspended animation for a while.

Fortunately, prior to that happening we were able to take the original dbXML Core code, change the license to an Apache license and donate it to the Apache Software Foundation to form the project now known as Xindice. The Xindice project kicked off at the end of 2001 and we released Xindice 1.0 in Mar of 2002. We both continued working on Xindice for a while, but eventually were drawn away to other projects. Now, as Tom mentions in his announcement, Xindice hasn't fared too well of late and the project is pretty stagnant at this point. The project has been struggling to get a 1.1 release out. 1.1 was originally intended to be a quick bugfix release to go out a month or so after 1.0. Obviously it's been a fair bit more then a month at this point and the project is still struggling.

Anyway, somewhere along the way Tom was able to get back into a position where he could reanimate the dbXML Group to a limited degree and continue development of dbXML. In doing that he pulled the code back in house and made it closed source again. A few months back he released a beta of dbXML 2.0 and then followed it up yesterday with the announcement of a new Open Source version of dbXML under the GPL license.

Whew, this has turned into a bit of a soap opera. In the end what this means is that we now have three open source native XML databases written in Java, Xindice Apache licensed, eXist LGPL license and dbXML GPL license along with Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML. If nothing else there are at least choices.

Posted by Kimbro Staken