The Ashes

A few weeks ago Oracle announced that it has acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, but the deal is far from being finalized as the European Commission will investigate the deal and announce an approval or blocking decision on January 19, 2010. The Oracle-Sun deal has been approved by the US Department of Justice, it has only one stumbling block left until the deal is completed. The European Commission said that this deal will increase the prices while consumers will have fewer choices for database software.

If the deal goes through the European Commission is very concerned that the reduced competition will have a huge effect on the consumers market. The EU said that the deal will have to undergo very careful examination because we’re talking about world’s leading proprietary database company which will take over world’s leading open source database company.

EU officials say that they just want to make sure that consumers will not have less choices at higher prices after the Oracle Sun deal as consumers have to have the possibility to choose from as many alternatives that are available now. The main reason of the investigation is the MySQL database of Sun which is in direct competition with Oracle’s database software.

via WSJ

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