Oracle acquires Sleepycat software

I saw some rumors floating around that this was going to happen, and today Oracle announced that they've acquired Sleepycat Software the makers of my favorite native XML database, Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML. Congratulations are in order for the guys at Sleepycat.

For my own projects, I don't know if this is a good thing or not yet. It definitely won't be a good thing if Oracle makes the project closed source. I'm sure we'll find out before too much longer.

This is now the second major piece of open source database infrastructure that Oracle has acquired in the last few months. Hopefully this just signals a trend that they're planning to support the open source community, rather than a trend that they're going to use their might to pull critical projects off the open source map.

Posted by Kimbro Staken