EU OKs Oracle Sun deal

EU OKs Oracle Sun deal

Story by Newsdesk, 25-01-2010, 0 comment

Deal is not a major barrier to competition in Europe, says competition watchdog.

Oracle has gained unconditional European Union approval for its billion takeover of Sun Microsystems.  The European Commission launched an investigation of the deal when it was announced in December, looking at aspects such as the future of Sun's MySQL database.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned, " said EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a statement. "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

The decision was influenced by Oracle's promises regarding the future of MySQL. Oracle promised in mid December that it would continue to release of future versions of MySQL under the GPL (General Public Licence) open source licence.

The investigation also found that other databases provided competition. "The Commission's in-depth investigation showed that although MySQL and Oracle compete in certain parts of the database market, they are not close competitors in others, such as the high-end segment. The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market."

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