On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 11:29 -0400, Barnett, Jeffrey wrote:
> IBM has an RDBMS horse in the OSS race (Called "Derby").  It doesn't seem to have much of a following.  

Heh. So, IBM bought Informix, contributed an overhauled version of
Informix Cloudscape to Apache as Apache Derby, and then mostly got out
of the Apache Derby business a few years later when they stopped
offering paid support for IBM Cloudscape (the IBM-branded redistribution
of Apache Derby), although I believe it is still used as a persistence
layer by many IBM products. 

At the same time that IBM was getting out of the paid support business
for Apache Derby, Sun was busy investing heavily in it (in terms of
developers) and wound up embedding it in Java SE Development Kit under
the branded name "JavaDB". 

The Derby mailing list still generates a fair bit of traffic. It's
certainly not as high-profile as, say, MySQL or PostgreSQL. 

In the context of the Oracle-Sun and MySQL/OpenOffice/yada yada parent
thread, Derby demonstrates that a software project can 1) go from
proprietary to open source, 2) be contributed to by (in some ways)
direct competitors, and once it is open source 3) lose commercial
support from one company but gain it from another, and 4) survive for
whoever depends on it and wants to continue using it regardless of what
commercial entities may do.

I hear there's at least one good book about Apache Derby out there,
although it's rather dated now...