snelson.org.uk/john

Oracle officially announced the XQilla license change today. It feels like this has been a long time coming - I was involved in pushing for the original Pathan project to be open sourced in 2003 when I worked at Decisionsoft. Later when I worked for Sleepycat, I was involved in pushing for a liberally licensed release of the XQuery implementation and improvements to Pathan which became XQilla some 3 years later.

It's great to see something that I've worked on for the last 7 years start to get the exposure I always thought it deserved. XQuery has huge potential to change the way that people use their data, and it's close relationship to the web means now might be the right time, and XQilla might be in the right place.

Thanks has to go to Mike Olson who put in the lion's share of the work needed to make this happen. Hopefully his efforts will make it easier for even more Oracle code to reach it's potential by being released as open source.