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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.
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC
Effectively, it's the EU.
Population of EU is about 500 million vs. 308 million for the USA, so the EC is kinda significant.
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Actually they're multinational companies, and Oracle stands to lose a fair chunk of change if they can't do business in EU countries. Not that I agree with this retarded group's findings. The whole "Can't sustain development without being able to sell proprietary licenses" is bunk. Plenty of opensource projects thrive without being able to sell proprietary licenses. Linux springs to mind.
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?
No, the current european-american exchange rate is about 1 to 1.5, so you should count each of us as 1.5 person.
(no seriousness intended)
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.
Last I heard, Oracle doesn't want to delay. It's the European Commission that wants to delay Oracle.
As for "monopolistic reasons": Between IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, PostgreSQL, etc, how can Oracle possibly be said to have a monopoly on databases?
You seem to be suggesting that Oracle wants to destroy the market for MySQL. As the largest database vendor in the world, how does it benefit Oracle to destroy any market for databases, however large or small?
And that's assuming it's even possible for Oracle to do what you suggest. Even if the goal is merely to destroy the market for low-cost databases, I don't see how Oracle could do that. There is no shortage of low-cost (free) alternatives to MySQL -- PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite, the list goes on.
If Oracle doesn't immediately cave in to the European Commission, have you considered the possibility that it might be because Oracle plans to grow the MySQL market, and that even at $100 million/month, it has not yet sacrificed enough profit to make up for all the money it plans to make from MySQL in the coming years?
Breakfast served all day!
If you think MySQL is any threat to Oracle, then you don't understand anything about the commercial database market.
I think Oracle's target market are the web 2.0 cowboys who originally went with MySQL, grew up and realized they needed something more robust, and are currently tied to MySQL because those other alternatives would break their extremely MySQL-specific code. If Oracle can provide a flawless backwards compatibility layer for MySQL, they'd have an edge over the other guys.
Well, standing up to badly behaved American companies.
Try some research before you post nationalistic crap like that. The EC has fined european companies in the billions range for violations of anti-corruption laws, does the same anti-trust checks on european companies and so on.
Wake up. 50 years ago, the US had the moral high ground on the rest of the world, but you can't go downhill forever without losing it.
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Moral high ground? Would that be after stooping to the level of the USSR in playing third-world countries like pawns -- the CIA coups in Iran or Guatemala in the early fifties? After backstabbing her allies at Suez a few years later? Or after encouraging the Hungarians that same year? Or were you thinking back to the World War -- and the wonderful economic timing of joining it two years late, when her last ally was finally bankrupt?
Come to think of it, I can't remember any instance where the US had the moral high ground since its revolution. Sure, if you compare it to the Soviet Union, it had the moral high ground, but that's not much of a comparison, is it?
This isn't a dig at the US, it's a decent country. But far too much of its propaganda is still believed, probably because it's top nation.