SAP DB Database To Be GPLed?

martin-k writes: "German newsticker www.heise.de reports that SAP will announce tomorrow the GPL release of SAP DB, a database based on Software AG's Adabas. Have a look at www.heise.de but be sure to have Babelfish handy - it's in German." Babelfish is at Altavista - but the translation is bad. As far as I can tell, it sounds like they are expecting the announcement tomorrow, at LinuxWorld Germany, with the license being either the GPL or the LGPL. If you are fluent in German, please post a little more in the comments. From what I can tell it's not their flagship, but one of the parts of one, or another database?

Comments

SAP DB ~= Adabas-D

[Christopher B. Brown]

SAP DB was previously known as Adabas-D, which, in the venerable past, was one of the original databases on which R/3 ran.

In the even more ancient past (which is really quite some time ago; possibly before some readers were born!), the mainframe-based R/2 system was able to use Adabas on mainframes.

If SAP DB is GPLed (or LGPLed), this is a very interesting thing, probably moreso than the "freeing" of Interbase, as Adabas-D was more like a "scaled down mainframe system" than like a "scaled up PC system."

Another interesting property of Adabas-D that is hopefully inherited by "Free-SAP-DB" is that it provides an Oracle SQL compatibility mode that tries hard to provide equivalent functionality to Oracle... Probably useful for porting Oracle apps over to it...