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Acquisitions for Software Developer

In today`s business world it seems that the easiest method to grow and expand as a company is through mergers and acquisitions. Hundreds of firms are finding that buy-outs help develop a business quickly and efficiently. This is particularly the case for software development and web-based businesses. It turns out that one-third of the rumor surrounding Oracle buying a trio of open source companies was true. Oracle today announced that it will acquire open source database vendor Sleepycat. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition adds Sleepycat`s line of open source Berkeley DB databases to Oracle`s embedded database product line. Sleepycat develops three versions of Berkeley DB: Berkeley DB, Java Edition and XML. Sleepycat just recently updated its Berkeley DB Java Edition to version 2.1, which is an incremental upgrade over version 2.0. Like MySQL, Berkeley DB is licensed under a dual-license model that includes both public and commercial licenses. In a release, Oracle claims that Berkeley DB, "is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million".

The Oracle acquisition comes after much speculation that Larry Ellison was on the hunt for open source companies. The original speculation had Sleepycat, JBoss and PHP`s patron Zend all on the table. The acquisition of Sleepycat is the second key open source database component company bought by Oracle in fewer than four months. In October, Oracle acquired Finnish database vendor Innobase and its discrete transactional database technology, InnoDB. InnoDB is a critical part of open source databases, such as MySQL.