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Dec. 17, 2009

Overall, European state regulators have given Oracle a rather tentative green light in its long-delayed merger with Sun Microsystems, now that Oracle has issued many concerns about the stewardship of the open source MySQL database. But will they fully approve the deal nevertheless? There are still some potential issues that remain uncertain.

For now, all that's left is for the EU commission to write its report from the hearings and submit it to the larger EU regulatory body. So there is still some process left for Oracle to claim that its Sun acquisition is fully completed.

The news first broke in the New York Post, which said Neelie Kroes, the out-going chair of the EU's committee on fair competition, likes Oracle's promises and that Oracle is expected to form an advisory group of MySQL customers.

The good news for Oracle (and however many Sun employees survive the expected layoffs) comes after a two-day hearing in Brussels where a number of Oracle corporate clients all testified on Oracle's behalf.

On the other side of the table, testifying against Oracle were two of its biggest rivals, Microsoft and SAP, along with MySQL creator Michael Widenius.

Widenius launched an 11th hour appeal to "help save MySQL" from Oracle but that has apparently fallen short, at least for now.

Some observers still think that there's a chance that might change, but it may be another few weeks until we find out for sure, especially given the fact that the X-Mas and New Year's Holidays are so close.

To be sure, the EU commission has until January 27, 2010 to make its decision public, but it probably won't take that long some IT industry observers think.

What motivated the EU in the other direction was Oracle's proposed 10-point plan for MySQL. In that newly-proposed plan, Oracle promised, among other things, to invest more on R&D for the MySQL Global Business Unit than Sun did in its most recent fiscal year, which was $24 million, and to do so for at least until Dec. 2012.

Oracle promised commitment to future GPL releases, synchronized releases of the Linux Community and Enterprise versions of MySQL and a five year moratorium on legal action against any third party that chooses to implement MySQL's Pluggable Storage Engine (PSE) architecture without distributing code for that implementation under the new GPL proposal.

The latter promise really went over well with the EU and Kroes reaffirmed her statement that she is optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, while ensuring that the transaction will not have an adverse impact on effective competition in the European database market.

But she also urged caution and not to come to a final conclusion that the acquisition of Sun is a done deal.

Martin Reynolds, research vice president with Gartner says "I think that what we are seeing here is the idea of fighting was a bad one. But this sure doesn't sound like fighting to me. If we can see this go through, it's about time because it's costing a lot of money to Oracle."

So while the EC is "comfortable with the assertions Oracle has made over the last 10 days," as the source put it, the deal is still not done until all the paperwork is filed. And there is a lot to file!

Gartner just held a data center conference with some clients, and Reynolds said that customers were actually quite optimistic about the potential for a combined Oracle-Sun.

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Source: The New York Post.

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