Should Oracle Dump Europe Before MySQL?
Oracle’s push to get its purchase of Sun completed has hit a well-publicized snag with the European Commission on competition. The EC wants to be sure that Sun’s popular open source database, MySQL, will continue to evolve and be a free alternative to commercial offerings from Oracle, IBM (NYSE:IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and others. For its part, Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) insists the EC’s fears are unfounded and that it plans to continue support of MySQL; it also said it won’t separate it out from the deal. Meanwhile, Sun loses value, customers and staff daily as it twists in the wind. The DoJ issued a rare public statement expressing disapproval of the EC’s move, and the EC’s response was to disapprove of the DoJ’s disapproval. Neelie Kroes (chair of the European Commission on competition) recently told European journalists, “Let’s be optimistic, and let’s find out if they could take us to a point that we say, ‘OK, here we can take the result as a satisfying result for fair competition.
