“German software giant SAP plans to deliver its database to the
open source community by the end of the year. SAP is launching and
hosting a community forum at www.sapdb.org to provide users with
access to the web-enabled database software. Karl-Heinz Haas, SAP’s
executive vice president, said the company wants to foster a
dynamic environment for developers to evaluate, critique and
enhance SAP DB.”
“With SAP DB as open source, Linux moves one step closer to
delivering complete open solutions to customers,” said Dick
Hohndel, chief technology officer of European Linux distributor,
SuSE Linux. “SAP DB is proven and mature – in a word, an
enterprise-ready database for web solutions – and we are excited
that SAP has decided to open it up.”
“Observers believe the move could enable SAP to better
challenge Oracle and IBM in the database world. However, SAP
will also have to compete with the open source community’s MySQL
database. Rival Progress Software recently set up a unit called
Nusphere to distribute the database.”