Sleepycat Software, Inc. was the software company primarily responsible for maintaining the

Berkeley DB Berkeley DB (BDB) is an unmaintained embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitr ...

packages from 1996 to 2006.

is freely-licensed

database software In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

originally developed at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

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, 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 were all at

, where they developed the software that grew to become Berkeley DB. Sleepycat was originally based in

Carlisle, Massachusetts Carlisle is a town located northwest of Boston in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2020 U.S. Census, the town had a population of 5,237. History English colonists first settled the area now incorporated as the town of C ...

and moved to

Lincoln, Massachusetts Lincoln is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. The population was 7,014 according to the 2020 United States Census, including residents of Hanscom Air Force Base that live within town limits. The town, loc ...

. Sleepycat distributed Berkeley DB under a

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

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 Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...

redistribution condition similar to the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. Sleepycat had offices in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...

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 Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, 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 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 {{ict-company-stub

See also

References

External links