Oracle denies giving ground on Sun deal

Sam Varghese
Monday, 07 December 2009 02:50

Opinion and Analysis

Oracle has denied a report that its head, Larry Ellison, has given ground in the battle with the EU for the acquisition of Sun Microsystems.


Oracle announced the deal in April. The completion of the acquisition has been held up by the EU's investigation into what it terms anti-competitive aspects.

Oracle is the dominant proprietary database and if the acquisition goes through it will also control MySQL, the dominant open source database.

The EU has to make a final decision by January 19. The US Justice Department has approved the deal and US politicians are putting pressure on the EU to pass the deal.

A report in the New York Post claimed that Ellison had agreed to create a separate entity within the company for MySQL.

This was denied by Oracle. The company has lodged a request for an oral hearing with the EU about the deal.

Oracle has encountered resistance to its acquisitions in the past; when it tried to buy PeopleSoft, the US DoJ itself blocked the deal. After two years of wrangling, a judge overruled the DoJ and Oracle was able to go ahead.

MySQL was bought by Sun some years ago. One of MySQL's founders, Monty Widenius, joined Sun but left in February this year.

The MySQL code, which is under the GPL version 2 licence, has already been forked by Widenius to create MariaDB , and by Brian Aker to create a lightweight database known as Drizzle.