EC Formally Objects To Oracle's Purchase of Sun 334
eldavojohn writes "The EC has presented Oracle and Sun with a statement of objections. Despite the promotion of former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, the statement seems to focus entirely on
what many have feared: MySQL vs. Oracle databases. From Sun's 8-K SEC filing: 'The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the
market for database products.' The EU and the EC are getting a rep for disagreeing with US counterparts." On Monday afternoon the DoJ reiterated its support for the deal. Matthew Aslett has a helpful timeline of the action from the EC.
I Object! (Score:5, Funny)
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God bless slashdot. Anywhere else I would be feeling stupid and immature for reading that and thinking immediately of that joke. On slashdot? It's the first post.
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Why is this page all blue?
"ack ze brightness... zhe hurts me eyes!"
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Sun, not Sol.
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That's no moon... ... That's a BATTLE STATION!
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I believe that would be Delos D. Harriman [wikipedia.org]!
What is the EC?? (Score:2, Informative)
The European Commission (formally the Commission of the European Communities) acts as an executive of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union.
EC objects? (Score:2, Funny)
What do DC and Marvel think?
Why does Oracle need MySQL anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
Re:Why does Oracle need MySQL anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
Frankly, Ellisons refusal to spin it off is the strongest indication that the purpose of acquiring MySQL as part of the deal is anti-competitive. As you say, it's not as if Oracle really needs it, so it shouldn't be this much of an issue.
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I understand (dimly) that MySQL has myriad failings, but it's possible that clustered databases are going to be "THE FUTURE" ... not that they will replace all types of database service, nor that they should, nor even that all the monolithic RDBMSes which will be replaced with clusters should be... but I should think that Oracle has something to fear from MySQL clustering. It will serve many needs where Oracle was formerly the only credible player, just as MySQL has long been replacing the use of various co
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That's my take on this too. With MySQL Clustering you can start small and cheap, then scale out later to levels of performance (and resilience) that leave Oracle RAC in the dust. Use a consistent hashing algorithm on the app server tier that includes node weighting and you can happily mix DB servers with different performance characteristics, making good use of more powerful servers as they're released. Oracle strongly recommend that all nodes in a RAC cluster look and function the same which is a bit re
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And what advantages does MySQL has over Oracle when it comes to clustering?
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Frankly, Ellisons refusal to spin it off is the strongest indication that the purpose of acquiring MySQL as part of the deal is anti-competitive. As you say, it's not as if Oracle really needs it, so it shouldn't be this much of an issue.
ACK. I've been smelling "turn it into a parking lot" from Day One on this.
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You may be right, but don't discount the possibility that Ellison just doesn't want to be told what to do.
Re:Why does Oracle need MySQL anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
I seriously don't see why Oracle needs MySQL.
Product mix - as the marketing guys call it. MySQL has a market that Oracle doesn't. How many folks use Oracle as their back end for their websites? Now they have products that cover more of the market for RDMSs; which I believe, makes them the leader, but by no means able to control the market as the EC fears.
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MySQL has a market that Oracle doesn't.
People who don't want to pay for a database. What if Microsoft bought Sun? Would Star/OpenOffice be classified as being in a different market as MSOffice?
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Car analogy warning!
The same reason that GM made and sold compacts and even when they wanted everyone to buy uber SUVs: if you won't buy the soccer-mom-battleship, maybe you'll buy their smaller vehicle.
Even Oracle (in its dark, festering, inner heart-of-hearts) realizes that not every DBMS installation needs Oracle 13qq UnrealMegaApplicationHyperClustering (tm). MySQL is the foot in the door. If you'll buy the GM compact car now, it's more likely you'll buy the GM RoadWhale later when you become a fat exur
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Just spin it off, keep a small interest that will prevent the spun-off unit from going rogue, and claim victory.
Does MySQL own the IP for a test suite that proves compatibility with the standard, such as Java does? Just curious here, don't really know.
On the other hand, Open or not, there are ways you can capitalise on IP by diminishing its impact in the market. Gentle, persistent, overtly benign yet pernicious change will do it. The principle of "extend, embrace, extinguish" isn't just limited to one monopoly.
And here I worry about Jim Fisk's ghost buying up the equivalent of today's Red Car line (ref: Chinatown,
Oracle's reasons *are* monopolistic! (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see...MySQL brings in ~50M a year, Sun is losing 100M a month. Makes no sense why Oracle would want to delay, except for monopolistic reasons.
Re:Oracle's reasons *are* monopolistic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see...MySQL brings in ~50M a year, Sun is losing 100M a month. Makes no sense why Oracle would want to delay, except for monopolistic reasons.
Last I heard, Oracle doesn't want to delay. It's the European Commission that wants to delay Oracle.
As for "monopolistic reasons": Between IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, PostgreSQL, etc, how can Oracle possibly be said to have a monopoly on databases?
You seem to be suggesting that Oracle wants to destroy the market for MySQL. As the largest database vendor in the world, how does it benefit Oracle to destroy any market for databases, however large or small?
And that's assuming it's even possible for Oracle to do what you suggest. Even if the goal is merely to destroy the market for low-cost databases, I don't see how Oracle could do that. There is no shortage of low-cost (free) alternatives to MySQL -- PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite, the list goes on.
If Oracle doesn't immediately cave in to the European Commission, have you considered the possibility that it might be because Oracle plans to grow the MySQL market, and that even at $100 million/month, it has not yet sacrificed enough profit to make up for all the money it plans to make from MySQL in the coming years?
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As for "monopolistic reasons": Between IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, PostgreSQL, etc, how can Oracle possibly be said to have a monopoly on databases?
The job of the EC anti-trust commission is to prevent monopolies before they happen, not punish them when they do (the way the Sherman act works in the US). So their fear is not that Oracle would be a monopoly, but that it comes too close to being able to corner the market. You don't need a monopoly for that, just a commanding influence.
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So is their job to prevent monopolies or prevent commanding influences?
I disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
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And you can be pretty bloody sure that if Oracle owns MySQL, that'll never change.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
But MySQL is low end. It's about as low end as you can go without using MS Access.
Is it a shot against it if what you're saying is true?
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Oracle's target market are the web 2.0 cowboys who originally went with MySQL, grew up and realized they needed something more robust, and are currently tied to MySQL because those other alternatives would break their extremely MySQL-specific code. If Oracle can provide a flawless backwards compatibility layer for MySQL, they'd have an edge over the other guys.
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What about the Berkeley DB they bought? They'll just need postgresql and sqlite next.
And how would Oracle "buy" either of those? And why? PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and SQLite is public domain. Oracle is free to start selling its own version of either package tomorrow, if it felt like it.
Is company health considered? (Score:4, Interesting)
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Would the EU perform a similar analysis on Sun and figure that, given its situation, the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt, in which case the situation is, conceptually, the same because either way Sun ceases to be a player. Or do they not consider this and simply line up the bullet points, see too much overlap, say no to the merger (which is not the same as an objection, I realize), and just hope that Sun can pull it together by itself?
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As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Neither Sirius nor XM could merge while spinning off one of their satellite radio operations into a new company, to maintain a "semi-free market" or a "free-er market".
It would be trivial to sell off mysql. Heck, give it away. Sell it to the FSF for $1?
Re:Is company health considered? (Score:4, Interesting)
the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt
If Sun goes into reorganization or liquidation assets like MySQL would probably be sold off and Oracle would likely be blocked as a buyer of MySQL, so the EC's main objection would be resolved in an acceptable fashion either way. The purpose of government in a competitive free market should be exactly that; prevent anticompetitive behaviour and structures, not support failing companies.
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As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Would the EU perform a similar analysis on Sun and figure that, given its situation, the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt...
First of all, Sirius/XM (AFAIK) doesn't broadcast in Europe.
Second, the Europeans and the USA have differing philosophies when it comes to anti-trust regulation.
America's philosophy is to protect the competitive process & competitors.
The Europeans' goal is to protect the competitive process & consumer welfare.
So to directly respond to your question, the Europeans would perform the analysis and not have any qualms allowing Sun to fail.
As an aside, when Sirius and XM originally got their satellite rad
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Or they would have had to hand in one of their licenses, which sounds like the more logical solution.
There are other solutions than either merging or 'allowing to fail'. MySQL could be spun off as a separate business, or could be sold to another company.
Anti-competitive
Perhaps they should adopt easier goals (Score:2)
"The Europeans' goal is to protect the competitive process & consumer welfare."
You mean like requiring MS to offer a version of Windows without a browser?
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Company health? Either way, Sun is dead if this deal goes through--Oracle merely wants dibs on the corpse. They will scavenge what they can, and sell off the rest or simply let it rot.
Sun has some very cool hardware and software, not to mention an open source friendly attitude--probably none of which will survive the acquisition. I would rather see Sun struggling to survive than on the chopping block for a company like Oracle. I can't imagine that OpenSolaris, ZFS, Sparc, VirtualBox, Java, MySQL, or anythin
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Not sure I get the EC ruling (Score:3, Interesting)
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And Europe can let get in their say.... (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM may be doing what they can to stir the pot on this. With each delay, Sun's survival is more in question, and more business can be sucked away from Sun by IBM.
The objection (that Oracle will have "control" of an Open Source product like MySQL) is absolutely absurd. First of all, there is nothing Oracle can do to prevent others from continuing to update and support MySQL under GPL. Many Open Source projects continue under GPL. MySQL has a huge "out of Oracle's reach" GPL effort already.
Secondly, the database market is dynamic with many new competitors entering the field. MySQL as a relational database faces competition from a host of nonSQL databases whose performance and capacity relational databases cannot match.
The real problem with the merger is politics for profit and spite. Heaven forbid the EU allows two American companies to merge. The EU likes to keep their own mergers to a minimum .... like with Airbus?
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When something strange happens, such as the claim that Oracle will be able to control the database market once they get control of an Open Source project like MySQL .... I have to ask "Who Benefits?"
Why does asking this question get me a Flamebait?
Perhaps I didn't frame the observation clearly.... One possibility requires us to identify who benefits in the market by slowing down this merger? Well, IBM does. They are making offers to any and all engineers away from Sun. They are offering specials to repla
A Rep? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why should the US be able to decide what is good for Europe and its consumers? Sun and Oracle have the choice of no longer doing business in Europe at which point the EC won't have anything to do with their merger!
US regulations suck for consumers, whereas the EC attempts to work for the consumer. That is the reason for the difference, and whether you like it or not that is how it will continue to be done as multi-nationals can't just stop selling in the EU or the US just because one of them is more favoura
Good Business (Score:2, Insightful)
Oracle is pursuing a very good business model with the Sun aquisition.
1) Eliminate somebody else from buying them, like IBM.
2) Get all that neat Java stuff
3) Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive.
4) Get MySQL and finally kill it by letting it wither. MySQL is probably the biggest threat right now to Oracle's dominance in the database marketplace. My controlling
it they can drive the software literally into the ground.
It was a $7B bargain.
Re:Good Business (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think MySQL is any threat to Oracle, then you don't understand anything about the commercial database market.
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Re:Good Business (Score:4, Informative)
"Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive."
Really?
How much do you know about "that SPARC stuff?" It's true that x86 has finally surpassed a lot of the things that Sparc led the way in, but there are still ways that traditional Sparc scales better.
Now moving to the next generation of Sun's gear, we have hardware virtualisation and CoolThreads. Under a hundred grand will buy you a system with four 8-core CPUs, and each core can process eight simultaneous threads. That is OLTP nirvana! Too much power? Chop it up into a handful of smaller servers, each running their own OS. Any one of them can in turn be split into zones--soft OS partitions.
I keep hearing about how Sparc is obsolete, and yet the new generation of Sparc processors and supporting hardware is pushing the state of the art that Intel and AMD aren't even planning in yet.
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"Some hardware engineering but that SPARC stuff really isn't competitive."
Really?
How much do you know about "that SPARC stuff?" It's true that x86 has finally surpassed a lot of the things that Sparc led the way in, but there are still ways that traditional Sparc scales better.
Now moving to the next generation of Sun's gear, we have hardware virtualisation and CoolThreads. Under a hundred grand will buy you a system with four 8-core CPUs, and each core can process eight simultaneous threads. That is OLTP nirvana! Too much power? Chop it up into a handful of smaller servers, each running their own OS. Any one of them can in turn be split into zones--soft OS partitions.
I keep hearing about how Sparc is obsolete, and yet the new generation of Sparc processors and supporting hardware is pushing the state of the art that Intel and AMD aren't even planning in yet.
Umm... what?
First of all, for "a hundred grand", I can buy 10 systems that add up to 80 Intel 3Ghz cores (160 threads) with 720GB of memory, which is going to shit all over that SUN box with its anemic 1Ghz processors. That's retail pricing, in Aussie dollars! Including tax! Delivered to your door in under a week, assembled!
Meanwhile, to get that SUN box, I'd have to "call your nearest SUN dealer". Oh good, I can't wait to have him explain to me how spending $100K is going to "save me money", or something.
I
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Despite your rant, and despite some truth to some of your observations, there is hope yet. Sun's biggest mistake is that they have been run by children.
Rock was in process for 15 years and never shipped a part. 600 engineers x 15 years, and you wonder that they were not bankrupt years ago. Off to the side, you had folks at Sun building small, fast, low power servers. The whole Niagara line. They didn't get that much respect from their childish management, but they shipped parts.
These servers are availa
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http://blogs.sun.com/BestPerf/entry/tpc_c_world_record_sun [sun.com]
That non-competitive SPARC stuff recently trounced IBM and HP in performance/dollar, performance/watt and performance/rack. I'd hate to see what you define as competitive.
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It's like Gordon Brown at No. 10.
Doesn't matter, until the situation changes. Who would invest? I say that as a shareholder.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
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27 of them to be exact; in operation it appears similar to the U.S. Executive Cabinet, if said cabinet was appointed by the 50 States instead of the president.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/EU_Insigna.svg [wikimedia.org] Why is there a hole in the middle of Europe? Is that where the CERN Accelerator used to be?
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Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
The EC is.. who now?
EC is European Commission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission [wikipedia.org]
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Btw, can anyone tell me how it would hurt competition if Oracle buys up the suckiest branch of MySQL?
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC [wikipedia.org]
Effectively, it's the EU.
Population of EU is about 500 million vs. 308 million for the USA, so the EC is kinda significant.
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No, the current european-american exchange rate is about 1 to 1.5, so you should count each of us as 1.5 person.
(no seriousness intended)
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They have socialized healthcare, i.e. euthanasia committees, so by next week they'll all be dead.
Stephen Hawking might escape, if his wheelchar can make it to the US embassy (free sovereign soil! NUMBER ONE!) in time.
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Bah. You can't count those Europeans as a whole person!
Fine, we'll do it the old way.
They'll get counted as 3/5ths of a person for the census.
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...thereby weakening the south's power, and offsetting power in favor of the "free" north.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Funny)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC [wikipedia.org] Effectively, it's the EU.
You linked to the European Commission page (which is what the article means).
FWIW, I (a European) misinterpreted it as meaning "European Community"- albeit assuming that Slashdot was using it slightly inaccurately as an anachronistic synonym for the EU. Mainly because that was its primary meaning in day-to-day usage around 15+ years ago.
(The EC was effectively the predecessor to the EU, as it was the largest and most important organisation that went up to create the latter. Much like the EC was in turn
Since when did the Oracle move from Athens?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod parent up, I'm tired of the /. eds assuming i know what every god damned acronym means. (Sure I can google it, but usually I just move on)
That's assuming you get right definition of "EC". Everyone here seems to assume that googling things will give you the correct or relevant answer.
For example, I googled it and E. Coli doesn't want Oracle in Athens to predict what Apollo will say.
So there!, "why don't you google it" Nazis!
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That's assuming you get right definition of "EC". Everyone here seems to assume that googling things will give you the correct or relevant answer.
For example, I googled it and E. Coli doesn't want Oracle in Athens to predict what Apollo will say.
EC = "Educational Comics". They originally published educational stuff, but these days all they publish is Mad Magazine, I think.
I'm not sure why they care if the Oracle purchases the sun.
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(Sure I can google it, but usually I just move on)
Do you want me to tie your shoes for you, your highness?
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If I posted this about the acronym "US" you can be damn sure I would mbe modded troll in a heartbeat.
And they are?
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They didn't post EU. If I posted NGA would you automatically know what I was talking about?
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If I posted NGA would you automatically know what I was talking about?
That's completely offensive. I'll have you know my ex girlfriend is black. CRKR.
...but, to answer your question: no.
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You down with O.P.P.?
Yeah you know me.
Who's down with O.P.P.?
Every last lady!
Haaaaaarm me with harmony! "O" is for other, "P" is people scratching temple. The last "P" well that's not so simple. There's five little letters that are missing and you get it on occasion after the partying is ending (and it rhymes with hussy). For the young'uns who have no idea what I'm talkin' bout - move your mouse and click'it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuFlaFYdgE [youtube.com] - (Man I miss the hiphop 90s. Miley Cyrus i
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If I posted this about the acronym "US" you can be damn sure I would mbe modded troll in a heartbeat.
1. This is a website specifically aimed at US citizens.
2. I live in the EU, and I still wouldn't have had a clue if I hadn't read about this deal in the past. At two letter acronym is not unique across the globe.
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"...not specifically American nerds."
Are you sure?
http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed850 [slashdot.org]
"Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans"
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If TLAs were universally unique you'd maybe have a point.
But they aren't.
Given that there's a relatively small number of letters in the alphabet, it's guaranteed that some acronyms will be duplicated with different meanings in different domains, communities or whatever. And if you happen to be in the wrong one (i.e different to clown who wrote the article) then it's quite understandable that you'll be confused.
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Re:F the EC (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually they're multinational companies, and Oracle stands to lose a fair chunk of change if they can't do business in EU countries. Not that I agree with this retarded group's findings. The whole "Can't sustain development without being able to sell proprietary licenses" is bunk. Plenty of opensource projects thrive without being able to sell proprietary licenses. Linux springs to mind.
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How do you respond to this scenario?:
Oracle owns MySQL. Oracle shapes MySQL's development very slowly over the course of a decade or two, cementing it in its current niche (and, thus, it will never be a threat to Oracle's ridiculously fat profit margins).
In this scenario, do you think there will sufficient impetus
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If it is apparent that Oracle is dragging their feet on development AND their is a significant desire for a more capable database then yes a fork will happen. Either that or people will flock to alternatives. The biggest thing that bothers me about this objection is the fact that Oracle and MySQL aren't competitors. This is like someone raising a stink about Caterpillar acquiring the company that makes my riding lawnmower. Sure they both make tractors, but they're not really aimed at the same markets.
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Both Oracle almost certainly have EU-based subsidiary companies in various European countries, so I imagine they could - at the very least - block the merger of those.
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They can and will fine them, just like they fined Microsoft and Intel. You don't pay? Get fined again. Still don't want to pay? Do your business elsewhere and say bye bye to the biggest market in the world.
If you want to make business within the EU abide you will have to abide to the rules.
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I hear they like to sell their stuff in the EU, so maybe they should care.
They could not threaten the EU, for fear it would declare their copyrights null and void.
You seem to have a pretty messed up sense of how the world works.
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You do to. EU contries can not declare copyrights null and void without small changes like pulling out of the WTO and nullifying the Berne Convention.
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Not entirely true. You can have fun with copyrights without leaving WTO, in fact there was a case earlier this year of a small caribbean nation getting a free pass on US copyrights as penalty payment for some US WTO violations.
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But who granted that pass? It certainly wasn't the small caribbean nation.
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Both Oracle and Sun do an enormous amount of business in Europe and as such I expect they operate locale offices or divisions that exist as entities subject to European law.
Similarly US subsidiaries of organizations such as Siemens who are primarily European are subject to US law. (And why it was legal for Cuba to nationalize all those companies way beck when, their ball, their rules.)
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Yeah, right. Oracle is letting one of it's largest markets fall just so they don't have to sell MySQL.
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Seriously, what can the EC do about it?
Forbid them from selling their stuff in the EU. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Oracles income comes from the EU. That is a significant amount of money they cannot afford to lose.
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There's nothing wrong about the EC trying to prevent monopolies/unacceptable mergers. They have a say too, because these companies operate there.
Multinationals aren't based in a single country (Score:2)
I am not a business lawyer. However, if the Chinese Companies that wanted to merge included EU-based subsidiaries then I expect that, yes, they would have a problem with that and have the legal authority to block the merger via preventing the merge of those subsidiary companies. If Oracle and Sun want to pull out of the EU they'd have to uproot the fairly substantial business operations, buildings and staff that they have there. Oracle, in particular, has a huge office in the UK.
If they don't want to be
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Are they really "American companies"? They both have their headquarters in the U.S., but operations quite distributed. What proportion of each company's employees are based in the United States? I've actually been looking for that information and can't find it, so not a rhetorical question.
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They are American companies. Soon to be an American company.
*yawn*
always the same old crap. Maybe I should write a reply-macro.
I'll make it short: The EU can kill them.
Europe is a bigger market than the US. It is also an important hub towards the near and middle east and eastern Europe, Russia, etc. for most american companies. Not being able to do business in the EU is a deathspell for most international corporations. Especially in the technology sector where the technology and competitors that will emerge in Europe to take your place can easily expand world-wide.
If the EC complains it is so unfair, Oracle can suggest they either stop selling SUN hardware or Oracle software to the EU, and let those bueacratic bastards pick how they best wish to further retard the quality of their citizens lives.
F
Re:F the EC (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, standing up to badly behaved American companies.
Try some research before you post nationalistic crap like that. The EC has fined european companies in the billions range for violations of anti-corruption laws, does the same anti-trust checks on european companies and so on.
Wake up. 50 years ago, the US had the moral high ground on the rest of the world, but you can't go downhill forever without losing it.
Re:F the EC (Score:4, Insightful)
Moral high ground? Would that be after stooping to the level of the USSR in playing third-world countries like pawns -- the CIA coups in Iran or Guatemala in the early fifties? After backstabbing her allies at Suez a few years later? Or after encouraging the Hungarians that same year? Or were you thinking back to the World War -- and the wonderful economic timing of joining it two years late, when her last ally was finally bankrupt?
Come to think of it, I can't remember any instance where the US had the moral high ground since its revolution. Sure, if you compare it to the Soviet Union, it had the moral high ground, but that's not much of a comparison, is it?
This isn't a dig at the US, it's a decent country. But far too much of its propaganda is still believed, probably because it's top nation.
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what are the EC going to do? Sanction them?
Restrict them from doing business in EU.
How well do you think it would go down if no one in europe could use Oracle or MySQL anymore?
Well, I'm sure that both Microsoft and IBM would be extremely happy to offer any Oracle ex-customers in EU MSSQL and DB2, respectively. And encouraging mass migration of MySQL users to PostgreSQL is worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize all by itself (it's more than some people did to earn it...).
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Although these companies are primarily based in the US they have some fairly substantial operations in the EU. I don't imagine that they like the idea of moving those, especially if it involves moving them further from a market that they're trying to sell into. Europe probably would miss Oracle and MySQL but Oracle-Sun would probably miss having a presence in an enormous market and would not welcome the costs of moving parts of their operation into the US or to other places outside the EU.
When they entere