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, to create a replacement for the used on UNIX systems dbm library. The new development database was marketed from 1992 as part of 4.4BSD, and was under the BSD license.

The impetus for the commercial marketing of Berkeley DB and thus to the formation 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 in November 2005, approximately 30 employees; President and CEO since 2001, was Michael Olson.

Sleepycat was an example of a successful business model based on open - source software. Berkeley DB is - similar to MySQL - under a dual license offered: a free, open source database under the GPL -like Sleepycat License, as well as a proprietary variant to engage in conventional " closed-source " products. As a prerequisite for a dual licensing Berkeley DB is not developed as a community project, but as an internal company project, so that all rights to the source code belong to Sleepycat.

About two-thirds of the turnover of Sleepycat attributable to royalty income, the remaining third is generated by services ( support, training and consulting). The company was profitable from the start, not listed and independent of external investors. Berkeley DB is more than 200 million used according to the company times. Among the customers of Sleepycat included telecommunications, networking and hardware vendors such as Cisco Systems, Motorola, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard as well as the Internet company Google, Amazon, AOL, and Yahoo!.

In February 2006, Sleepycat was acquired by Oracle.