Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> Groklaw

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

EU Commission Approves Oracle-Sun Deal With No Conditions

By Pamela Jones et al.

It's official. The Oracle-Sun merger has been approved by the EU Commission. There are no conditions.

Here's the press release, in which Neelie Kroes states that she is now satisfied that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition: "I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

I'm very grateful, personally, that the EU Commission cares about Open Source, but after its extensive investigation into MySQL, despite some misinformation, as I viewed it, it found, "The Commission's in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment." That is true.

It took into account Oracle's pledges, for example the pledge to continue to release future versions under the GPL, and Oracle has already, the press release states, taken action to implement some of its other pledges "by making binding offers to third parties who currently have a licensing contract for MySQL with Sun to amend contracts" and the Commission believes that this should allow third parties "to continue to develop storage engines to be integrated with MySQL and to extend the functionality of MySQL." So I'm satisfied that the decision was based on accurate information in the end, which was my chief concern, and I consider this, considering all the possibilities that were being considered, a happy ending. Even better would be: 1) if Oracle would affirmatively confirm Sun's patent pledge regarding Linux and Red Hat and 2) if it would update the GPL version on MySQL to GPLv3.

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).