Today the EU createded a serious road block on the road to the merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Here is the timeline of events up to now.
European antitrust authorities formally objected to Oracle Corp.’s proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems Inc., complicating a $7.4 billion deal that U.S. officials had already blessed.
The companies said Monday that the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, issued a statement of objections regarding the deal, which they said focuses on whether Oracle’s takeover of Sun’s MySQL database software would reduce competition in the database market.
Here is a quick recap of MySQL history, and how it got where it is today:
- MySQL is born in 1994.
- MySQL becomes the most used and popular database used by websites.
- Sun Microsystems buys MySQL for 1.0 Billion Dollars.
- Sun hemerages money, Oracle steps in to buy Sun/MySQL.
So where does this leave MySQL and hundreds of sites that depend on it? Sun has predominantly been a hardware company. Oracle recently introduced its software running on Sun hardware (You may have seen the ads comparing Oracle Running on Sun being x number of faster than same software running on IBM hardware). Oracle maintains that MySQL will continue to stand alone as a open-source product. However that may just be the problem that the EU has with it, saying that because it will be owned by Oracle, which already has a powerful commercial product, the merger will prevent MySQL from becoming another powerful database commercial competitor. So, what do you think? Will MySQL wilt in the shadow of the mighty Oracle?