From the
‘
Monty Doesn’t Know Best‘
files:
At long last, the European Commission has come out against Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun. My colleague Andy Patrizo wrote about this yesterday and he forecast that this would happen last week on our podcast too.
The deal breaker is Oracle’s ownership of the open source MySQL database, which to me makes no sense whatsoever and is proof positive that the EC/EU doesn’t understand the open source model at all.
The EU objection in my opinion will do more harm than good to both Oracle and Sun, as well as the MySQL database that the EU is trying to protect.
I also think that if the objection stands and the deal is blocked, it will also be a very bad omen for the entire open source market.
What company in their right mind will want to acquire an open source vendor knowing that they could run into an EU objection? Who wants that kind of grief?