Oracle buys Sleepycat
Oracle has acquired another open source company, this time Sleepycat, the commercial side of Berkley DB used by many open source projects across a wide range of applications.
The acquisition means customers have access to a fast, open-source database at low cost and with “enterprise-class support,” Oracle said.
Except you don’t have to buy them to offer “enterprise-class support”… The more obvious the spin here, the more inclined I am to believe they’re hiding their purpose.
Citing unnamed sources, BusinessWeek reported last week that the company was in talks to buy Sleepycat, Java application server vendor JBoss, and PHP developer Zend Technologies.
Now we’re getting somewhere and I find it rather disturbing. In trying to acquire JBoss and Zend are they attempting to acquire two of the largest quasi-commercial technologies that use MySQL? Is a pattern emerging?
Last year it bought Finland’s Innobase, which makes the InnoDB database engine used at the heart of MySQL AB’s database. The move was widely seen as a competitive swipe against MySQL, an Oracle rival.
With Berkley DB and InnoDB Oracle owns the two back-end used by MySQL.
This could get ugly.