Sun-Oracle Deal Getting Probed by the EU
The European Union today announced that it will launch an investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Oracle announced its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in the second half of April. Approved by shareholders in July and the Department of Justice in August, the EU was to be the last to sign off on the deal. However, the New York Times reports that the European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, has said the deal could restrict competition in the already “highly concentrated” market for databases. Kroes today announced that the EU would be investigating the $7.4 billion deal.
Kroes said EU regulators must very carefully examine 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,” and went on to say that the investigation would examine whether customers of the two technology giants “would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover.”
Do you think Oracle's acquisition of Sun represents some genuine antitrust concerns? Let us know in the comments below!
Read the full story on NYT.

Some European software is good, I use both Opera and Nero Burning ROM. I liked Serious Sam (though Croatia has yet to be allowed into the EU). At the same time, I don't know of any European OSs or Database programs, so I don't know what solution the EU proposes. You can't sue for damages when you have nothing to be damaged, and the EU shouldn't be able to regulate American companies when they don't even have any of their own in competition.
aside joke: For everyone in EU, this is why you'll never see price cuts for Xbox, because the EU would then say you can't ship the system with Xbox Live since other consoles aren't up to par yet.
In other words, EU is seizing every cash cow available.
The $2billion Microsoft bailout helps a lot, believe me.
I rely on a lot of Sun's open source products to get stuff done (MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Java and sometimes play around with Solaris).
If Oracle is to shut these projects down, then we might as well be f**k'd.
Funny you should say this in this thread since MySql is a European (Swedish) program. "MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems,[4] which holds the copyright to most of the codebase." Wikipedia.
And while we are at it, how about the Linux kernel, that is actually a European (Finnish) OS kernel.
Since America got probed by Internal Affairs.
And for all of you who are concerned about the cash cow issue, take a look at your own country and the way it's screwing YOU out of YOUR tax money and then worry about a "poor" company that's doing shady business. But I guess this is what blind patriotism is all about. ... sheep