Sleepycat Software, Inc. was the software company primarily responsible for maintaining the Berkeley DB packages from 1996 to 2006.

Company

Berkeley DB is freely-licensed database software originally developed at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

for 4.4BSD Unix. Developers from that project founded Sleepycat in 1996 to provide commercial support after a request by Netscape to provide new features in the software. In February 2006, Sleepycat was acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

, which continued developing Berkeley DB. The founders of the company were spouses Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic, who are also original authors of Berkeley DB. Another original author, Michael Olson, was the President and CEO of Sleepycat. They attended

, where they developed the software that grew to become Berkeley DB. Sleepycat was originally based in Carlisle, Massachusetts and in 2000 moved to Lincoln, Massachusetts. Sleepycat distributed Berkeley DB under a proprietary software license that included standard commercial features, and simultaneously under the newly created Sleepycat License, which allows open source use and distribution of Berkeley DB with a copyleft redistribution condition similar to the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. Sleepycat had offices in

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

and the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

, and was profitable during its entire existence.

References

External links

Oracle Berkeley DB
— successor to Sleepycat's web site {{Authority control Defunct companies based in Massachusetts Defunct software companies of the United States Free software companies Oracle acquisitions Software companies disestablished in 2006 Software companies established in 1996 2006 mergers and acquisitions American companies disestablished in 2006 American companies established in 1996

Company

See also

References

External links