unixODBC is an open-source project that implements the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) API.
[2] The code is provided under the GNU GPL/LGPL and can be built and used on many different operating systems, including most versions of Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft's Interix.
The goals of the project include: The unixODBC project was first started in the early months of 1999 (by Peter Harvey) and was created as at that time the developers of iODBC (another open source ODBC implementation) were not then willing to LGPL the code, expand the API to include the current ODBC 3 API specification, and did not consider the addition of GUI based configuration tools worthwhile.
The driver manager was rewritten by Easysoft's Nick Gorham soon after the project started.
Nick assumed leadership of the project in July 1999 with Peter Harvey continuing work on supporting code.