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EU Commission Opens In Depth Investigation of Sun-Oracle Deal

By Pamela Jones et al.

The EU Commission has just released a press release. They are not going to approve the Oracle takeover of Sun just yet anyway. Instead they are launching an in depth investigation of the deal, and it's MySQL that seems to be the issue. Here's the press release. This doesn't mean it won't happen, and the deadline for a final result of the investigation is January 19, 2010. But they are certainly asking the right question, namely, what happens to MySQL in Oracle's hands?

The proposed transaction would bring together two major competitors in the market for databases. The database market is highly concentrated with the three main competitors of proprietary databases - Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - controlling approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue. Oracle is the market leader in proprietary databases, while Sun's MySQL database product is the leading open source database.

The Commission's preliminary market investigation has shown that the Oracle databases and Sun's MySQL compete directly in many sectors of the database market and that MySQL is widely expected to represent a greater competitive constraint as it becomes increasingly functional. The Commission's investigation has also shown that the open source nature of Sun's MySQL might not eliminate fully the potential for anti-competitive effects. In its in-depth investigation, the Commission will therefore address a number of issues, including Oracle's incentive to further develop MySQL as an open source database.

Isn't that exactly what you've been wondering? More information on the case as it continues will be available here.

Full post as published by Groklaw on September 03, 2009 (boomark / email).