Oracle-Sun merger wins EU’s blessing

Commission says its concerns about competition on the database market have been assuaged.

The European Commission today approved Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems, after commitments made by Oracle to keep a popular database available for free.

The Commission launched an in-depth investigation into the merger in September because of concerns that it could harm competition on the EU database market.

Sun Microsystems owns MySQL, the world’s leading open-source database, while Oracle is one of the three main database vendors in the EU.

Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for competition, today said that she is “now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved in all the markets concerned”.

The Commission’s concerns were allayed by a series of public commitments made by Oracle on 14 December and by what it described as strong evidence that PostgreSQL, another open-source database, is a “credible alternative” to MySQL.

Among Oracle’s public commitments is a pledge to continue to release new versions of MySQL under an open-source license.

The Commission had been criticised for taking too long to reach a decision on the deal, which was announced by Oracle and Sun in April 2009 and cleared by US antitrust authorities in August.

Over half the members of the US Senate signed an open letter to the Commission in November urging it to speed up its work.

“With our Department of Justice having made a compelling case that the merger does not pose a threat to competition, it is fair to ask the European Commission for the basis on which a delay on decision-making is warranted, and to make a decision one way or the other,” the senators wrote.

The Commission insisted at the time that it had a duty to ensure that the EU market would not be negatively affected by the deal.

Opponents of the takeover, including Michael Widenius, MySQL’s creator, are now pinning their hopes on the Russian and Chinese antitrust authorities, neither of which has given ruled on the merger.

“It’s not in the internet users’ interest that one key piece of the net would be owned by an entity that has more to gain by severely limiting and in the long run even killing it as an open-source product than by keeping it alive,” Widenius wrote on his blog last month.

“If Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be looking at less competition among databases, which will mean higher license and support prices. In the end it’s always the consumers and the small businesses that have to pay the bills, in this case to Oracle,” Widenius wrote.

Click Here: Cheap FIJI Rugby Jersey