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db4objects Introduces New Licensing Option to Extend Open Source Compatibility

New dOCL license fosters rapid adoption of db4o in wider range of open source projects

SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 24, 2007 - db4objects (www.db4o.com), creator of the leading open source object database, today announced the introduction of a third licensing option dubbed dOCL (db4o Opensource Compatibility License). The licensing option supports free/open source projects that want to embed db4o under standard open source licensing terms other than GPL.

This announcement broadens db4o's adoption for projects licensed under Apache, LGPL, BSD, EPL, and other standard open source licensing terms. Major open source projects that currently include or that plan to include db4o are Novell's Mono, Redhat's Fedora-Linux, Eclipse (Apogee), Spring, JPOX, Apache-Lucene (Gdata) and Funambol (SyncML).

"The introduction of the dOCL is great news," says Costin Leau, Spring committer and Consultant at Interface21. "It allows easier integration within open source projects which, in the end, will benefit developers and users. I plan to include spring-db4o integration directly in the (Spring Modules) project and release the db4o support in the next SM version (v0.8)."

"I always loved db4o but as an Eclipse developer couldn't work with it, because the Eclipse Public License is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL)," says Dave Orme, who in 2003 founded and led the Eclipse Visual Editor Project as the first Eclipse project to be started and led outside of IBM. "Today, with the dOCL, that all changes. This is huge - it makes db4objects accessible to a much wider range of open-source projects."

"Many of db4o's 20,000 registered developers work with open source projects in the Java and .NET space that are not necessarily licensed under the GPL," says German Viscuso, community manager at db4objects. "Our goal is to let many more developers experience first-hand, how much time and code they save by using a native object persistence solution rather than tedious object-relational mapping. The dOCL license is a great tool to distribute db4o with a larger number of free and open source software products, while keeping up the tit-for-tat paradigm: If you're free, we're free. Of course, we continue to offer commercial licenses for customers who offer their software for a fee."

About db4objects, Inc
db4objects, Inc (www.db4o.com) provides db4o, the world's most popular object database, native to Java and .NET and available under open source and commercial licenses. With 20,000 registered community members and one million downloads, db4o is used in a broad array of industries around the globe.  Customers include the world's most innovative companies, including Boeing, Bosch, Intel, Ricoh, and Seagate. db4objects is based in San Mateo, California, and backed by noted Silicon Valley luminaries including Mark Leslie, founding CEO of Veritas; Jerry Fiddler, founding CEO of Wind River; and Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Press and analyst contacts: press@db4o.com

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