The European Commission, the European Union’s top competition authority, has opened an in-depth investigation into Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion takeover of Sun, and, until they’re done, it won’t approve the Oracle/Sun acquisition. Are you kidding me?
This is so wrong-headed in so many ways.
First, the commission’s reason for doing this, explained Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a statement is to “examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world’s leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world’s leading open source database company (MySQL).”
On the surface that sounds good. But, if you know open source and you know what’s happened to MySQL you know it’s an argument with no merit. Oracle could kill MySQL the second it has control over Sun, and it wouldn’t matter a bit. MySQL’s code is already out there and anyone can reproduce, support, and improve it. Oracle can’t put the open-source genie back in the bottle. No company can.