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.'"

So it would be tempting to echo the sentiment of Seeking Alpha columnist Dennis Byron, who wrote that Oracle should dump Europe before it dumps MySQL.

Byron comes from a position of 30 years experience in the IT industry, including time as an IDC analyst. His argument is one of numbers, not flag-waving sentiment: Europe's biggest nations (England, France and Germany) only provide less than 15 percent of Oracle's revenues, and that's down from 16 percent in fiscal 2008.

"Why go through the hassle of dealing with EU regulators when it appears the return on investment is so low? My suggestion is to just consummate the merger without EU approval and don’t do business in the EU," he wrote.

Why Europe is key

A nice sentiment, perhaps, and Byron does keep it from being purely an emotional one, arguing the return on investment isn't worth the headache. But it just isn't feasible, said Mervyn Adrian, president of IT Market Strategy.

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"They need to stay in Europe. Oracle services multinationals of all sizes, so there's no such thing as not being in Europe. Even if your initial contact and first sales are taking place in other geographies, if you are dealing with large companies, they are doing business in Europe. And if they are doing business in Europe and they are using your software, the EU will get involved," he told InternetNews.com.

That's not to say he's taking the side of the EC. On the contrary, Adrian said that the EU is interfering in the guise of "protecting consumers" when there is little evidence they will help "consumers" in any way. If anything, he feels the EC is trying to make Oracle prove a negative.

"This is coming down to a contest of wills. When a regulator says to a company 'prove to me that you are not hurting competition' when there is virtually no concrete evidence to prove they are, then this no longer feels like an evidence-based proceeding, it feels like a conclusion-based proceeding, and it feels like they came to a conclusion based on no real evidence," he said.

The other issue is what happens if the EU gets its way. "Who benefits? The consumer will not be helped if Sun collapses completely," he said.

The ultimate irony is that the segment of the business that the EU is trying to "protect," the open source database business, is not being affected at all by the delay in closing the deal. "The software side is not getting clobbered by this, it's the hardware business and that's a big piece of the portfolio Oracle is trying to acquire."

But all that said, Oracle has to stay in Europe. "You can't make the choice if you're a large multinational company servicing large multinational companies to not serve in Europe. It's not a decision you can make," concluded Adrian.

(Update adds Oracle 2008 sales figures and clarifies Byron's position on Oracle's European business.)