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 span ...

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 Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

to provide new features in the software. In February 2006, Sleepycat was acquired by

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

, which continued developing Berkeley DB. The founders of the company were spouses

Margo Seltzer Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, 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. 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, located in the MetroWest region o ...

. 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 int ...

license that included standard commercial features, and simultaneously under the newly created Sleepycat License, which allows

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. Sleepycat had offices in

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

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 continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, 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