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Oracle Acquires Sleepycat
Deven writes "Computerworld is reporting that Oracle has just acquired Sleepycat Software (makers of the open-source Berkeley DB embedded database) for an undisclosed sum. Having previously acquired Innobase, Oracle is certainly taking a look at diversity."
Diversity? It looks more like careening towards homogeneity to me. First they bought Innobase, giving them the ability to cut MySQL's transaction nuts off, then they buy another open-sourece-friendly DBMS which has transaction capability.
Now, if you were the largest commercial DBMS vendor in the world and you were worried about the OSS people moving into your space, what would you buy in order to stop them cold? Me? I'd keep them out of atomic transaction space.
Do keep in mind we are talking about Larry Ellison here. Just google on "larry ellison greed" to see what some other people think of this champion of diversity.
The price of these acquisitions is chump change for Oracle. My bet is that they are buying these companies to destroy them. Oracle does not want something like Mysql becoming a real threat to their DB business, so the tried and true solution is to kill the babies before they grow up. They will attempt to migrate what customers they can and then stop development on the acquired code bases. The acquired developers, if they stick around, will be put to work building migration tools.