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On Nov. 20, the European Commission granted Oracle an extra week to “further develop its arguments” in response to the commission’s anti-competitive concerns regarding Oracle’s bid to acquire Sun. Oracle requested the extension from Jan. 19 to Jan. 27, citing disruptions caused by the Thanksgiving holiday.
The ongoing developments in Oracle’s months-long efforts to purchase Sun have become the equivalent of a regulatory soap opera. The EC has made it clear that it views Oracle’s potential acquisition of Sun’s MySQL open source database as a major threat to market competition. Oracle has countered that the EC has a “profound misunderstanding” of competition in the database market and of open source dynamics. Meanwhile, software groups such as the Open Rights Group and Knowledge Ecology International have implored Neelie Kroes, the EC Commissioner for Competition, to prevent Oracle from acquiring MySQL from Sun.
Bloomberg claims it has obtained a document from the EC in which the commission has stated its fears that Oracle would obtain “total control” of MySQL’s source code and intellectual property if the Sun deal were to be approved without any restrictions. Oracle “could change the terms of MySQL’s open-source licenses, restricting the ability of other companies to develop competing products,” according to the Bloomberg article.
Sun’s ‘ownership’ of MySQL isn’t a black-and-white situation. Sun does offer MySQL under a commercial license for paying customers. But even if Oracle were to acquire MySQL, it wouldn’t be able to change the distribution of MySQL forks in the open source community.
Kroes has stated that she’s “optimistic” that a settlement can be reached in the case. Any talk of a settlement suggests that Oracle would be willing to make some kind of concessions regarding MySQL. So far, Oracle hasn’t shown any willingness to change its course on the Sun deal, at least not publicly.
Another week doesn’t buy Oracle a lot of extra time to respond to the EC’s anti-competitive concerns. Oracle has already notified the commission that it doesn’t view its pending acquisition of MySQL as a competitive constraint since its own proprietary Rdbms and MySQL each cater to different sets of customers (i.e. large enterprises versus smaller developers), which they do.
Still, when you command such a big portion of the database market, as Oracle does, any additional market share that could be obtained through acquisition could be viewed as a competitive threat. The U.S. Department of Justice apparently doesn’t believe that. But the EC does. And it has the wherewithal to block the deal.
Stay tuned...
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