Oracle's Sleepycat acquisition adds an embedded database to Oracle's product line, and in a surprising comment from one of its VPs, the company said the acquisition will help the company learn more about the open-source business model. The implication here is that Oracle either has no clue about how to make money with free software, or that no one has a clue how, and that Oracle is actually moving toward knocking off some of its potential open-source competitors to allow it to continue business on a decidedly unfree model.

For now, nothing but good will has been expressed by the two parties in the recent deal.

"We're very excited to join the world's largest enterprise software company and the industry's leading database company," said Mike Olson (pictured at left), CEO of Sleepycat Software. "Sleepycat's products, customer base and proven business model, combined with Oracle's tremendous expertise, complementary technology and resources, will allow us to better serve the needs of our customers and the open source community."

"Sleepycat's products enhance Oracle's market-leading database product family by offering enterprise-class support to customers who need to embed a fast, reliable database at a lower cost," said Andrew Mendelsohn (pictured below), senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies.

Sleepycat Software's Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million. Berkeley DB is distributed under a dual license model, i.e. available under a public license and also available under a commercial license. Well-known open source projects such as the Linux and BSD UNIX operating systems, Apache web server, OpenLDAP directory, OpenOffice productivity software, and many others embed Berkeley DB technology.

Now that Oracle has announced the acquisition of Sleepycat and its open-source Berkeley DB to its portfolio, will open-source app development company JBoss be next? Also in the rumor mill in recent weeks as an Oracle acquisition target is Zend, the php dev company, although no one from any of the parties has commented on this.

(SYS-CON Media conducted an  interview with JBoss CEO Marc Fleury last year, during which he recounted the growth of the company from start-up to legitimate enterprise contendor, and also did a little dance.)