History of FreeTDS

FreeTDS was and is developed by observation and experimentation, which is to say, by trial and error.

In early 1997, the only option for connecting to a Sybase server from Linux or other free systems was an aging Sybase-released version of OpenClient. Unfortunately it had a few problems. The original release was a.out based, although Greg Thain did a great service in converting the library to ELF. Secondly, it included only the newer ct-lib API. The older db-lib API was missing.

Brian Bruns, a Sybase DBA and originator of the FreeTDS project, had some db-lib programs he wanted to run under Linux, and thus began the FreeTDS project. The original work focused on