The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius has launched a web campaign to try and prevent Oracle from gaining ownership of the open source database which is part of the properties it acquired along with Sun Microsystems in April.
The European Commission launched an investigation into the deal earlier this year, citing competition concerns as MySQL is the most widely used open source database and Oracle already owns the most widely used proprietary database.
Recent reports have indicated that a series of public commitments that Oracle made with regard to MySQL had swung the Commission round to Oracle's side.
The US Justice Department has given the deal the go-ahead.
But Widenius hasn't yet given up. The new campaign brings in all his old arguments in favour of MySQL being spun off to some other entity.
Widenius also appears to be leaning towards a preference that the MySQL licence be switched from the GPL to a more permissive licence like the Apache licence.
He writes: "...a change to a permissive license like the Apache Software License 2.0 would give licensing-related flexibility, enabling someone to start a new GPL-based project including it or to develop it under the Apache license or whatever other license, even including the integration of the code into proprietary products."
His reason? "Liberalizing (sic) the license terms would mean that Oracle as the new owner of MySQL could not use its position to lock in some of MySQL's customers and partners."
But liberalising the licence would also mean that anyone can sell MySQL with proprietary modules and avoid the need to release the source for the entire package.
A meeting is scheduled to take place on January 10 at the EU commission; Widenius, and representatives from Microsoft and SAP, along with Oracle's representatives and customers, and Free Software Foundation legal consultant Eben Moglen are all due to attend.
David Bass
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