European Commission Approves Oracle’s Purchase of Sun Microsystems
Oracle Sun Microsystems
Jonathan Todd, Spokesperson for the European Commission, announced that they ultimately came to the conclusion that MySQL was not in fact a competitor with Oracle Database in certain high end applications prior to Oracle’s purchase of Sun. Additionally, he said it was determined Oracle would continue to face competition from “a number of other proprietary database vendors, including Microsoft, IBM and Sybase.” In many other business aspects, Oracle and Sun did not compete to begin with.
Concerns that the deal will kill one of the most successful open source databases in the world were allayed somewhat when Oracle pledged to continue support for MySQL going forward. Oracle assured software developers, customers and vendors that support would continue for five years, though this assurance was not codified in any sales agreement or binding contract. The European Commission did not demand this or any other conditions be tied to their approval of the deal.
Oracle Corporation was formed in 1977 and specializes in enterprise solutions, particularly database software. It posted revenues in excess of $23 billion in 2009 and employs nearly 73,000 worldwide. Sun Microsystems is involved with hardware production, as well as software such as Java and MySQL, and has been a major proponent of the open source software movement. Their StarOffice software was released the open source office suite OpenOffice.org under GNU and SISSL, and competed directly with office suites such as Microsoft Office.
Oracle’s purchase of Sun still awaits approval in other non-EU jurisdictions, though this was an important step.
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