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EC Formally Objects To Oracle's Purchase of Sun
eldavojohn writes "The EC has presented Oracle and Sun with a statement of objections. Despite the promotion of former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, the statement seems to focus entirely on
what many have feared: MySQL vs. Oracle databases. From Sun's 8-K SEC filing: 'The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the
market for database products.' The EU and the EC are getting a rep for disagreeing with US counterparts." On Monday afternoon the DoJ reiterated its support for the deal. Matthew Aslett has a helpful timeline of the action from the EC.
Well, I'd object to their purchasing the sun as well!!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The EC is.. who now?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) acts as an executive of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.
What do DC and Marvel think?
... insenitive clod.
One instance is enough to give them a rep?
Whatever that is.
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Let's see...MySQL brings in ~50M a year, Sun is losing 100M a month. Makes no sense why Oracle would want to delay, except for monopolistic reasons.
Oracle is marketed as an high-end database product/set of services. MySql is a low-end one (and please, don't misinterpret this as shot against it). Now, I'm not saying that you won't find companies replacing their Oracle database with a MySql one, but those are very few and far between. Between Oracle and MySql, there are actually quite of slew of decent alternatives (both proprietary and open source).
Mod parent up, I'm tired of the /. eds assuming i know what every god damned acronym means. (Sure I can google it, but usually I just move on)
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Would the EU perform a similar analysis on Sun and figure that, given its situation, the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt, in which case the situation is, conceptually, the same because either way Sun ceases to be a player. Or do they not consider this and simply line up the bullet points, see too much overlap, say no to the merger (which is not the same as an objection, I realize), and just hope that Sun can pull it together by itself?
And Sun or Oracle should care why?
They are American companies. Soon to be an American company.
Seriously, what can the EC do about it? Do they have a problem when Chinese companies that are bought, sold, destroyed and created in China and happen to sell products/services to Europe?
If the EC complains it is so unfair, Oracle can suggest they either stop selling SUN hardware or Oracle software to the EU, and let those bueacratic bastards pick how they best wish to further retard the quality of their citizens lives.
Let's be completely honest, this is a shake down, pure and simple, my recommendation is Oracle not pay and push back, my bet is like all things of French influence the EC will cower and back down.
Respect the Constitution
Mod parent up, I'm tired of the /. eds assuming i know what every god damned acronym means. (Sure I can google it, but usually I just move on)
That's assuming you get right definition of "EC". Everyone here seems to assume that googling things will give you the correct or relevant answer.
For example, I googled it and E. Coli doesn't want Oracle in Athens to predict what Apollo will say.
So there!, "why don't you google it" Nazis!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
This is somewhat like preventing Mercedes-Benz from buying Kia in order to prevent a monopoly. As well-stated earlier, Oracle doesn't compete against MySQL often if at all. IBM and Microsoft appear to be the most legitimate competition Oracle has in their DBMS space, and MySQL wouldn't seem to impact the competitive balance all that much. Having said that, who would want MySQL? Cisco, HP, and EMC don't seem like good choices because they all have product families that each would hate to have to tie to a 'Runs Best with MySQL' campaign. Red Hat makes sense from a certain point of view, but I'm not sure they want to diversify into the DBMS space.
Two shit database applications combined will give us the most shitty database in the world.
Ps. you suck Larry.
I am not a business lawyer. However, if the Chinese Companies that wanted to merge included EU-based subsidiaries then I expect that, yes, they would have a problem with that and have the legal authority to block the merger via preventing the merge of those subsidiary companies. If Oracle and Sun want to pull out of the EU they'd have to uproot the fairly substantial business operations, buildings and staff that they have there. Oracle, in particular, has a huge office in the UK.
If they don't want to be within the jurisdiction of the EU, I imagine they'd need to remove the technical and sales operations in those countries as well, move all those business operations to the US and then export from there to EU-based companies. They could have done that if they wanted to stay out of EU regulatory reach. So given they did not, they've already chosen to expose themselves to EU law. At that point, being subject to the local legal system is a cost of doing business there, like paying the local taxes. Their available remedy, similarly to the tax situation, is to lobby for a change of law or to move operations to a country where they like the laws better.
IBM may be doing what they can to stir the pot on this. With each delay, Sun's survival is more in question, and more business can be sucked away from Sun by IBM.
The objection (that Oracle will have "control" of an Open Source product like MySQL) is absolutely absurd. First of all, there is nothing Oracle can do to prevent others from continuing to update and support MySQL under GPL. Many Open Source projects continue under GPL. MySQL has a huge "out of Oracle's reach" GPL effort already.
Secondly, the database market is dynamic with many new competitors entering the field. MySQL as a relational database faces competition from a host of nonSQL databases whose performance and capacity relational databases cannot match.
The real problem with the merger is politics for profit and spite. Heaven forbid the EU allows two American companies to merge. The EU likes to keep their own mergers to a minimum .... like with Airbus?
to the EC controlling so much to Europe. How about we break YOUR asses up to nurture competition.
According to the article the last time the EU/EC contravened a takeover was when they denied General Electric's takeover of Honeywell in 2001. I'd hardly call two denials in a decade a reputation for disagreeing with the US on these matters.
Sorry, but I can't agree with you on this. Just because the number of alternatives will shrink, this doesn't mean that there still aren't a slew of alternatives and would make Oracle a monopoly on the RDBMS market. Think of MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, Teradata....for FOSS, think of Postgres, Firebird, even SQLite.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Oracle is pursuing a very good business model with the Sun aquisition.
1) Eliminate somebody else from buying them, like IBM.
2) Get all that neat Java stuff
3) Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive.
4) Get MySQL and finally kill it by letting it wither. MySQL is probably the biggest threat right now to Oracle's dominance in the database marketplace. My controlling
it they can drive the software literally into the ground.
It was a $7B bargain.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
...when VAX were great in the '80s. Lovely multi-language integration features too. But Oracle let it stagnate so they could sell Oracle's own rdbms on VMS.
The EU and the EC are getting a rep for disagreeing with US counterparts.
Generally, in a disagreement there are two parties that disagree with each other. Unless one wants to implicitly express that one side is right and the other wrong, that's the way it should be phrased.
Quite frankly, given that US "guardians" of the markets have just been caught sleeping at the wheel when they let the financial crisis happen despite experts having warned of the problems for about a decade, it's not as if they had much reputation capital left, do they?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The RotW is the colony of the USA.
God bless the best, fuck the rest!
Mod the parent of this up. I'm sure that IBM are benefiting from this protracted situation in a big way and given IBM's love affair with Linux, I'm sure that IBM is "helping" the EUC.
Oracle's intention here is to become a competitor to IBM and be able to provide customers with a complete solution.
This means you need to have alternatives and not a (virtual) monopoly / oligopoly, so I think it's a great move of EC to object to this merger because there is a serious concern that the number of alternatives will shrink (even though MySQL has an open source license). Just my 2 cents.....
Because all the competitors in the DB market are some how going to vanish because Oracle owns MySQL? Are you seriously trying to claim that MySQL is the only other DB in existence beyond Oracle's? And that MySQL is really even a competitor in the enterprise markets that Oracle is? Oracle's competitors are MS SQL, IBM DB2, Sybase, etc not some dinky piece of crap like MySQL.
Honestly I dont know why Oracle doesnt just tell the EC to cram it, they're US based companies, and what are the EC going to do? Sanction them? How well do you think it would go down if no one in europe could use Oracle or MySQL anymore?
"The Europeans' goal is to protect the competitive process & consumer welfare."
You mean like requiring MS to offer a version of Windows without a browser?
The US is being dragged into an unholy mess by treaties and agreements with foreign nations. Ever so steadily anything done in the US seems to also fall under foreign laws. And the US is partly to blame. After all insisting on controlling activities by groups such as Pirate Bay allows foreign nations the right to exert control over American actions.
These issues will never resolve.
Now for some perspective. There are estimated to be over 12 million MySQL installations worldwide. I can't find hard numbers on Sybase or Oracle, but assuming that Oracle and Sybase are about as popular as DB2, then the number of MySQL installations is nearly as many as all three of those vendors combined.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
always shitting in everyones tea..
The EC is much better at standing up to badly behaved companies than America.
Well, standing up to badly behaved American companies.
Selection bias. Unless the target of their actions is an American company, you will never hear about it.
ING and Royal Bank of Scotland, two of the largest financial institutions in the world, have been ordered to split up in the past few weeks. As these companies don't make gadgets, and aren't American, this news doesn't belong on slashdot, so you aren't aware of it. The EC deals with the European market, and as such primarily with European companies. You will never hear about it, it's not newsworthy in the US any more than news about Walmart is in Europe.
And many of these are powering toy applications.
But this is a baseless assumption. In terms of revenue, Oracle is by far the biggest. Unless Oracle is significantly more expensive than the competition, they almost certainly have more installations than you claim.
The EU is a very large market but it's also a very different market to the US. The customers are different, governments and regulators have different mindsets. The regulators for this very different place with different economies, different customers and different politics to those of the US states have come to a different decision to the US regulators? How very contrary of them!
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and forkable.
MySQL will be Sun's Oracle's property in name only.
always dumping everyones tea into the ocean..
The EU and the EC are getting a rep for disagreeing with US counterparts.
They're getting a rep for doing their jobs, in other words. The same cannot be said for their U.S. counterparts who have assumed the role of the fox guarding the hen house.
The job of the EC anti-trust commission is to prevent monopolies before they happen
How exactly is that different from a department of pre-crime?
So EU is basically saying IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server, plus PostgreSQL, together ain't much of a competition?
One more thing EC should consider is whether the deal will create more jobs or not.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Sounds very similar to Microsoft's 3 'E's business strategy...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Oh no, Since the Oracle can not buy the sun. Me must get the moon, so he can still predict the furture.
These fucking morons only doing shit to people. Frenchies pushing brain-dead laws, lobbied by M$ and now they are fucking with Oracle. Stupid dickheads, they know zero about Drizzle (MySQL fork), PostgreSQL and other open source players.
So MySQL is not really a deal. Real deal is that Microsoft and IBM does not likes Oracle purchase and here I suspect black money to block acquiring Sun.
What are you going to run on those Intel boxes?
Windows Vista?
When you buy the Sparc monster you get all the necessary software in order to partition your machine as needed.
With your 10 Intel machines, please pray tell me, how do you assign two of them to the same virtual server? (including memory, disk and network capacity).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That day the EU confiscates all of Oracle's assets in Europe, mandates that their copyrights are no longer valid, puts in trial as many Oracle's executives as possible, starts a massive migration from all kind of companies, even US based ones but with EU interests, to something else.
Yeah, if we are going to portray stupid scenarios I can also get carried away.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
the FUD cloud grows black, Sun's credibility and sales are going totally down the shitter now