About European Commission in-depth investigation into Oracle-Sun Merger
The European Union took the decision to opens in-depth investigation for fear of prices hikes, and IT veterans, open source experts and economists negatively commented the news.
Before expressing any opinion let’s see what the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:
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. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover. Databases are a key element of company IT systems. In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective IT solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.
MySQL is a tiny player in the database arena, but the importance of the most famous open source database goes well beyond its market share, indeed. MySQL is a fundamental building block of most open source stacks, and because of that is a very precious piece of open source code.
Neelie Kroes and the European Union might protect the extinction of MySQL in a much less ‘visible’ and yet effective way. EU open source funds are huge, and sometimes big bucks are spent in some debatable directions, if they want to help MySQL survival they could run a specific public tender.
EU has a chance to put our European money where its mouth is.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Peter Parker,
Josef Assad 7:14 am on September 7, 2009 Permalink
As I recall (happy to be corrected), naming specific products in EU tenders is in violation of tender law. To wit, a tender may reference a RDBMS as requirement but not SQL Server 2008. This is why for example the Hungarians got into hot water over the Microsoft-heavy public tender a while back.
It’s probably a bit unrealistic in this day and age to think that a tender can be specific enough without referencing specific technologies and products but that’s the law today and if we’re going to advise against naming Microsoft in tenders then MySQL shouldn’t be targeted with this form of financing either.
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Roberto Galoppini 11:54 am on September 7, 2009 Permalink
Hi Josef,
I was thinking of research calls, sorry. We can learn a lot from the past in this respect, see the PyPy Story!
Peter Parker 10:46 am on October 17, 2009 Permalink
Concentration in IT markets, especially in Europe, is basically induced by anticompetitive characteristics and legally questionable activities of three IT companies since long: IBM, Microsoft, HP.
Non-approval of upper merger will not lead to further competition. The opposite will be the case. Moreover the Open Source market,
actively promoted by Sun Microsystems, will suffer seriously.
Now this anticompetitiveness is actively supported by the EU commission’s antitrust division, headed by Mrs. Kroes. This fact is casting serious doubts in the work and competency of Mrs. Kroes’ team world-wide.
The commercial branch of MySQL has a market share of 0.4% officially and is thus far from being able to cause a concentration in the database market.
Having said this, I notify that EU commission’s decisions itself will have to be regarded as cause of concentration in case of
disapproval of above merger.
Roberto Galoppini 8:43 am on October 18, 2009 Permalink
Hi Peter,
I suspect that IT concentration has different roots. Europe missed to take advantage of the “packaged” software era in the early 90’s, but few players (SAP). IT market worked and works by reselling US software plus selling system integration services.
So said, I’m with you when you state that the commission anti-trust division seems to miss the real point, and as I wrote I’d like EU to put its (our) money where its money is.