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Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, the founder of the same MySQL open source database that’s at the heart of the European Commission’s concerns over Oracle’s plans to acquire Sun, has made an impassioned public plea for developers and others to inundate the EC with e-mails expressing their objections to the deal.
In his blog, Widenius raises a few interesting points. For instance, MySQL, which Sun purchased last year for $1 billion, was “mostly just used for the Web” ten years ago, Widenius writes. But nowadays, the open source database is used “in many of the world’s largest companies and they use it for an increasing number of purposes,” thus posing a significant threat to Oracle and its proprietary DBMS, he writes.
In a response to one reader’s comments, Widenius adds that “Oracle has a lot to gain by letting MySQL slowly die.”
Fact is, Oracle could benefit both ways. It could invest further in MySQL and use it to go after a new set of customers, including small-to-midsized businesses. Oracle has contended that it plans to invest more in MySQL than Sun has. That may not be too tough to pull off: Sun has only owned the commercial version of MySQL for a year and with its business in a downward spiral, it’s unlikely that Sun pumped too many resources into MySQL so far.
At a closed-door hearing held in Brussels on Dec. 10 & 11, Oracle received support for the Sun deal from some of its biggest customers, including the Spanish bank BBVA, Vodafone UK and the British National Health Service, according to The Wall St. Journal. Meanwhile, EC regulators also heard from groups that oppose the deal, including Microsoft and SAP.
Microsoft has some skin in the game: it has good reason to fear that Oracle could use its marketing muscle to compete with SQL Server in the SMB space. Meanwhile, SAP previously told regulators that Oracle’s purchase of MySQL would damage competition in the database market. What, did you expect a bear hug from Oracle’s top business applications rival?
In his blog, Widenius says the EC needs to make a decision either on Dec. 14 or Jan. 27, the deadline that the EC has previously imposed for deciding on the Oracle/Sun deal. I don’t think the EC is going to decide on the matter this week – it’s already dragged its feet on the deal for months and it’s going to continue to exert its political clout.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of response is generated by Widenius’ efforts and whether additional objections are raised by big-time enterprise customers that could further sway the EC, assuming it hasn't already reached a decision internally.
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