Oracle never really affected us in OpenLDAP much, until they bought Sleepycat and took over BerkeleyDB in 2006. For a couple years the Sleepycat team still ran things there but I suppose eventually their golden handcuffs came off. In 2008 Oracle started sending us threatening emails about needing a license to use BerkeleyDB in OpenLDAP. I forwarded a copy to Keith Bostic asking him wtf and he assured me it was a mistake; as an open source project we didn't need to sign a license with Oracle.

The matter seemed to be resolved but the following year Oracle sent another threatening email. So the desire to move off BerkeleyDB was firmly planted by 2008... Around that time we got contacted by MySQL, to do a joint project to build an OpenLDAP backend on their new NDB Cluster. This seemed pretty promising as a solution for scaling OpenLDAP capacity and soon we had a usable back-ndb. Then Sun bought MySQL, and the project grew to a partnership with Sun/OpenDS too. https://lists.openldap.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/thread/RS7KHPQLNCDYB35K2EJUWNPQBNLQRCJD/?sort=thread