Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Oct. 28, 2009

The European Commission is still worried about Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the open source database MySQL.

The EC is currently investigating Oracle's takeover of Sun and has previously said it is especially worried about the fate of MySQL.

A spokesman for Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the Commissioner had "expressed disappointment that Oracle had failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition issues or proposals for a remedy to the competition problems identified by the Commission."

Without further reassurance the EC could block the takeover or at least order Oracle to sell off the free database business first, this would potentially place Europe at odds with U.S. regulators which have already given the deal a green light.

The United States initially said it was concerned about how Java would be licensed.

The comments were made to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during a meeting in Brussels. The EC said it was happy to move quickly to approve the deal, provided its concerns over MySQL were met fully.

Interference from state regulators are the latest piece of bad news for the $7.4 Billion dollar deal.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius has often times backed up the EU position as has, perhaps less surprisingly, Richard Stallman.

Last April, Sun Microsystem's open source database division announced new plans to release MySQL updates on a more rapid basis. Now some are wondering, could this have something to do with the acquisition of Sun by Oracle? Well some do, and they might be just right as well...

MySQL 5.4, the first of those releases, is available in preview, with MySQL claiming it to be up 90 percent faster than MySQL 5.1 for certain types of queries.

MySQL chief executive is optimistic that Oracle will see the value in MySQL and will let them continue on the path they are paving with their new rapid release schedule.

"MySQL is so ubiquitous it will transcend its ownership," said Karen Padir, v.p. of MySQL and software infrastructure at Sun.

"We saw it as Sun acquired MySQL and we will see it again as Oracle is acquiring Sun. Oracle will be a very good steward to MySQL because they have to be! If they don't try and choose to squash it out, they won't be able to as it would accelerate even faster."

Not everyone agress with Padir, however. She is taking over leadership of MySQL from Marten Mickos, the former CEO. Padir pledged to be more transparent in her dealings with the community than her predecessor.

Padir added "we will be more transparent, we will give more to the community and we're doing monthly rapid updates to the community to release more often. There will be an emphasis on taking community contributions and putting them into the code."

There's no doubt that it will be interesting to see how all of this pans out with the E.C.

After all, Linux and the open source community does have a lot riding on this, since virtually every Linux servers in use today has dozens if not hundreds of MySQL databases running on them.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Source: The European Commission.

All logos, trade marks or service marks on this website are the property of their respective companies or owners.

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.