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Last week, the European Union’s antitrust arm announced that it intends to investigate Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems, citing anti-competitive concerns over the software giant’s potential absorption of Sun’s MySQL open source database. According to some analysts, Oracle could wind up commanding more than half of the enterprise database market if it were to snap up MySQL.
But if the commission does a thorough investigation and makes a ruling based on market realities, then it should ultimately decide that an Oracle/Sun combination wouldn’t be anticompetitive. Here’s why:
For starters, Oracle doesn’t really compete with MySQL in the database market. Oracle’s Rdbms is a workhorse for corporate transaction processing while MySQL is more commonly used by PHP and Perl scripts to help support Web sites. Although there’s some overlap between the two databases, there are fairly separate and distinct markets for their use.
Second, MySQL is an open source database. Yes, Sun offers MySQL under a commercial license for paying customers, and there are many of those. But even if it wanted to, Oracle can’t alter the distribution of MySQL forks in the open source community. Sure, it could kill the Sun version, but MySQL is already out there in the open source community for anyone to use. MySQL and different versions of it will continue to live on no matter what Oracle does with the Sun version of the database management system.
For instance, Monty Widenius, a MySQL founder, left Sun in February and started another fork of MySQL, MariaDB. Other MySQL forks in the open source community include Drizzle.
In the end, the EU’s investigation, which could take up to four months, may result in the commission asking Oracle to sell off Sun’s version of MySQL to another company. If that should occur, it will be interesting to see how Oracle reacts. Personally, I don’t think Oracle executives decided to buy Sun to get their hands on MySQL. They’re more interested in the long-term revenue potential for Java.
But that’s not to say that Larry Ellison and his team will go quietly into the night. If the EU holds up the Sun deal for another four months and competitors like IBM and HP continue to raid Sun’s hardware accounts and decimate the remaining value of Sun’s hardware business, then Ellison & Co. may decide to fight any ruling by the commission for Oracle to divest Sun’s MySQL business as a matter of principle. But the smart money says they’ll cut their losses and move on.
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