c3p0 is LPGL, latest release was in 2007, so might anyways be dead.
DBCP is in Debian and Ubuntu http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/lucid/libs/libcommons-dbcp-java

So, patches welcome... :)
Perhaps http://community.jboss.org/wiki/HowToconfiguretheC3P0connectionpool is useful in understanding the existing c3p0 code.

So you're saying you'd like help porting to DBCP? I'll see if I can drum up some help :) DBCP is in Fedora, too, FWIW.

Even if you get it to compile on OpenJDK (I thought I'd done so in the past..), etherpad doesn't run under OpenJDK; it crashes immediately. So, heads up on that too.

Any more details regarding the crash? For instance, what was the OpenJDK version and was it a JVM crash or some library issue?

Sorry, I have no details. It's easy to reproduce by compiling etherpad under Sun Java and then trying to start it using OpenJDK.

Our old FAQ entries/mailing list posts mentioned this and might well have included a paste of the error message.

It seems that c3p0 is imported in one single place in infrastructure/net.appjet.ajstdlib/sqlbase.scala: import com.mchange.v2.c3p0._;
I'll leave this to scala-literate people to judge if it's easy to replace in there or not.

Here's a good discussion of c3p0, DBCP, and the alternatives:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/520585/connection-pooling-options-with-jdbc-dbcp-vs-c3p0

@pedalpoweredsoftware Thanks, that makes it clear that DBCP is still to be avoided as the plague. BoneCP from http://jolbox.com/ seems to be a drop-in replacement for c3p0 and also with much better performance: http://jolbox.com/dynamic-benchmark.html
Who's up to testing BoneCP asap? Latest version 0.7 announcement: http://forum.jolbox.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=151
Also in 0.7 release notes: Changed license to Apache v2.0 -- so should be painless for apache-supporters to use this one :) Packaging though?

Also, choosing BoneCP means we need another 2 packages:

• SLF4J (MIT license & widely packaged) http://www.slf4j.org/
• a Collections lib which is found in http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/ or since it seems to need packaging, better go right at the newer superset library http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ (Apache2.0 license)