EU may delay Oracle's Sun acquisition European regulators could help create a further delay in the closure of Oracle's planned $5.6bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Reuters has reported European Union anti-trust authorities are sill deciding whether to approved he deal by Thursday's deadline, with concern centered on Oracle's ownership of MySQL. A decision to …
Gavin Clarke writes, "If there is a regulatory catch, though, it's likely to have been the fact Java will be owned and licensed by one of the largest Java vendors. The catch would be the terms and conditions Oracle made Java available under."
I would find it quite funny the E.U. could be concerned over the Java licensing as an unfair market advantage while IBM did not see sufficient value in Java (since IBM originally offered an original acceptable asking price, that was later reduced, to a price which was ultimately rejected.)
If companies like IBM cries & complains now, it would be more sour grapes, since they did not see the market value to buy Sun when they were available.
I guess we will see whether politicians in the E.U. perceive a higher value in Sun than the [hopefully] technically minded management in the market do.
"On databases, while Oracle might have dominant market share in RDBMS, this remains a relatively diverse market while MySQL largely plays in a different segment."
Sure, MySQL is now 'forked'. However the name MySQL and the brand still exists as well as its 'fanbois'.
Its interesting that this hasn't been made more of an issue since Oracle is the 800lb gorilla and MySQL, while playing in a different segment adds more to their hold on the database market.
MySQL on the low end with a migration path to Oracle on the high? This leads to niche markets for other players...
The Java issue is just a head fake.
Nothing better than a long, drawn out, extensive investigation by courtesy of your friendly eurocrats.
The faster the merger completes, the quicker the axe will fall onto those that still work for Sun in Europe. Better have what cash Sun got left drain into employee paychecks (and european tax income) as well - not only into golden parachutes of Sun's execs.
For once, Eurocracy is actually a good thing for Europe ...
(el reg, can we please have a golden parachute icon ?)
Sun is/was a steal, except what will be left. Do not expect this to close by Oracle world which was their hope. Nothing will be left by the time the EU approves this garage sale. All the good people are leaving and the bottom 50% are being RIF'd.
The SPARC line was down 36% last qtr, STK down 23%, Tape down 18%, not sure what other is but other systems products ($434M) down 66% and other storage ($30M) down 48%. The disaster is only lessened by every customer signing up for 5 year maintenance agreements because Oracle has a history of 47% price increases (bea weblogic) and killing products. (virtual iron)
....cheers from the UK
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