It looks as though the EC might wreck the deal to save Sun due to its Competition department's ignorant prejudice against proprietary software
The European Commission's Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes says: "The commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company." (Quoted from Bloomberg.)
The US Justice Department has already cleared the $7.4bn deal, which involves two American companies. However, so many American companies have used "anti-trust tourism" for their own competitive ends -- getting the EU to act against American rivals -- that they can't really complain about European interference in US affairs.
Neelie's concerns are, as usual, clueless, and could well be commercially damaging -- she wants to shovel sand into the engine of the European economy. Perhaps someone could explain to her that it's perfectly acceptable to produce proprietary software. Indeed, many hundreds of thousands of European jobs, and almost all of Europe's software industry, depends on its production.
Unfortunately, Neelie and her crew obviously don't understand that "open source" is not the same as "open standards", and nor is it the opposite of "proprietary".
The key standard for databases is the open standard for SQL (Structured Query Language), which both Oracle and MySQL and many other databases support. If the EC wants to do something useful, it could mandate an SQL interoperability standard for European government purchasing. (Database vendors may have some proprietary elements to their implementation of the open SQL standard, which can hinder making queries across multiple databases.)
What competition needs is a choice of interoperable SQL databases. Interfering in the means of production of these SQL databases is none of the EC's business.
If the EC rules against the takeover, Sun might try to spin off MySQL. It's a trivial part of Sun's turnover (there's no money in free software), and Sun only bought it in January last year. Although it paid a ludicrous amount for the company (roughly $1bn), it has little chance of selling it to anyone else, especially since, in the words of MySQL's founder and original developer Michael Widenius:
Sun's acquisition of MySQL did not go smoothly; most of the MySQL leaders (both commercial and project) have left Sun and the people who are left are sitting with their CV and ready to press send.
In fact, there's no evidence that Oracle would be a worse custodian for MySQL than Sun, which has made a pig's ear of both OpenOffice and the MySQL takeover. Indeed, Oracle already supports some open source database projects, such as BerkeleyDB and InnoDB. For example, Oracle's Open Source FAQ page points out that:
Oracle continues to develop and offer Berkeley DB as an open source product. Oracle Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million.
and
Created by Oracle subsidiary Innobase Oy, InnoDB is the leading transactional storage engine for the popular MySQL open source database. Innobase also develops and distributes the InnoDB Plugin, Embedded InnoDB and InnoDB Hot Backup.
I'm not that big a Larry Ellison fan, but I can't see that MySQL would be worse off at Oracle than it has been at Sun.
Either way, Sun is in long term decline, and it has already shopped itself around the usual suspects without finding any other company willing to save it -- not even IBM. Presumably even an organisation as consistently stupid as the EC's competition department should be able to figure out that Sun going to the wall is likely to prove more damaging than Oracle getting custody of MySQL.
Since the intention is to decide by 19 January, they have four months to figure it out.
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