Sleepycat software
Sleepycat Software, Inc. was an American software company based in Lincoln, Massachusetts . It was founded in 1996 by Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic. The development of the main product Berkeley DB , however, began in 1991 at the University of Berkeley in order to create a replacement for the dbm library used on UNIX systems . The new development database was distributed as part of 4.4BSD from 1992 and was under the BSD license .
The impetus for the commercial marketing of Berkeley DB and thus the founding of the company came from Netscape , which put together a collection of server tools and required external know-how for an LDAP server. Sleepycat employed about 30 people in November 2005; Michael Olson has been President and CEO since 2001.
Sleepycat was seen as an example of a successful business model based on open source software . Like MySQL , Berkeley DB is offered under a dual license : as a free open source database under the GPL- like Sleepycat License , and as a proprietary variant for integration into conventional “closed-source” products. As a prerequisite for dual licensing, Berkeley DB is not being developed as a community project, but as an internal company project, so that all rights to the source code are held by Sleepycat.
Around two thirds of Sleepycat's sales come from license income, the remaining third is generated with services (support, training and advice). The company was profitable from the start, not listed on the stock exchange and independent of external investors. Berkeley DB is used more than 200 million times, according to the company. Sleepycat's customers included telecommunications, network and hardware providers such as Cisco Systems , Motorola , Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, as well as Internet companies Google , Amazon , AOL and Yahoo! .
In February 2006 Sleepycat was bought by Oracle .