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EU officially objects to Sunacle deal
[Quote:]
The European Union has officially raised objection to Oracle’s proposed $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
According to a Sun Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the EU issued a “statement of objections” involving the merger today, and these objections were limited to concerns over Oracle acquiring MySQL.
“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 filing says.
Oracle responded with a statement that the EU’s assessment “reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics. It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source.”
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And what do you think about this?
I’m not sure. On one hand Oracle has a point that it can be forked, on the other hand, there’s a fork started the moment Oracle bought MySQL and it’s not getting anywhere. Forking is *not* easy, so perhaps the EU understands Open Source better than Oracle wants us to believe.