EU fiddles with MySQL while Sun burns
Neelie Kroes
(Credit: European Commission)IBM and Hewlett-Packard could not have planned it any better.
The European Union has launched an in-depth investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, potentially delaying the merger by several more months. In doing so, the EU is actually guaranteeing the demise of Sun's hardware business and gifting it to Sun's competitors by misunderstanding the deal's impact on open source, generally, and on MySQL, specifically.
If you haven't been paying attention, the delay on the merger due to U.S. and EU scrutiny has already resulted in two shockingly bad quarters from Sun. Many enterprise customers are already moving to competitors like IBM because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Further delay will only compound the problem.
Unlike the U.S., which approved the deal, the EU's Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is concerned that Oracle's takeover of Sun will end up diminishing competition:
Systems (like MySQL) 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.
The Commission doesn't have to. MySQL's open-source license already does. It's open source: even Oracle can't put the open-source genie back in the bottle once it has been released, as MySQL has, under the GNU General Public License.
Consider: some of the folks cheering loudest for the EU to clamp down on the proposed merger, like representatives from Monty Program, have already demonstrated Oracle's (and Sun's) lack of control over MySQL. Monty Program has created a significant fork, or derivative, of the MySQL database, and stands to gain much by the EU's obstructionism.
In delaying the merger, the EU isn't helping MySQL. It's helping its competitors, including Drizzle, OurDelta, MariaDB (Monty Program's fork), Percona, etc.
Competition within and around MySQL is alive and well, regardless of Oracle. After all, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has been saying for years, MySQL has never really competed with Oracle, anyway. MySQL serves (and has helped to create) a very different market: the Web database market.
When asked in April if Oracle's bid for Sun would end up hurting MySQL, Mickos responded: "MySQL works for Web-based applications. Oracle is for older, legacy applications." The vast majority of Oracle's revenue comes from enterprise IT. The vast majority of MySQL's revenue comes from Web companies like Facebook, Google, etc.
MySQL and Oracle don't really compete. They live in two very different markets.
So, if anything, Oracle's acquisition of Sun helps it leverage MySQL into a market--the growing Web database market--that its own technology is ill-equipped to manage. It also gets a lower-cost product with which to bludgeon its real enemy, Microsoft, coupled with a greater footprint in the rising open-source developer community.
Open source is not the enemy in this deal. Microsoft is.
The EU, however, has made itself an enemy to Oracle, Sun, and MySQL by holding up the merger, a situation that will only get worse due to its glacial pace, as CIO.co.uk's editor Martin Veitch suggests. Customers are not the beneficiaries of its intervention: Sun's server competitors like IBM are.
Though the EU purports to be in tune with open source, its meddlesome muddling reveals a surprising ignorance of open source, and shows a complete disregard for MySQL's true market opportunity.
UPDATE @ 6:59 Pacific on 9/4/09: I solicited comment from Gartner vice president and Distinguished Analyst, Donald Feinberg, who had this to say:
The EU does not understand open source. This is clear by using DBMS (MySQL) to extend the deadline. It also is clear that this is an attempt to use MySQL as a cover-up to a political agenda. It is protectionism at its worst.
The EU is entering deep water here, water that it clearly does not adequately understand.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
That might be why in US there were no questions about approval (Oracle and Sun complement each other in the NA market), yet in EU this is viewed as blatant buyout of a competitor what raised the question.
Many developers are in the EU, however, but the majority are in the US.
It would appear that much of the noise contributing to this decision (or, more properly, non-decision) are competitors of MySQL. It is difficult, for example, to understand how Monty Program can argue that Oracle's acquisition of MySQL could reduce the accessibility to MySQL when Monty Program has itself forked the code (and their tongue, I might add).
The EU and Neelie are *very* well versed in the merits of FOSS licenses and perhaps you recall the case last year that enabled the Samba team to get the specifications they had been wanting from MS? They forced MS to hand over their crown jewels for a basically irrelevant sum of money.
They do understand what Oracle might do and they have every right to investigate it.
"Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for Ms. Kroes, said at a briefing in Brussels that ?the enquiry will focus on the extent to which open-source software developers would be able to continue to develop software based on the open-source MySQL database,? which Sun bought last year and which is widely used."
You and I know that the existing GPL code is now "out there" and being forked willy nilly. But those forks aint MySQL... They can't be. They never can be. MySQL has a brand and a prevalence which many commercial vendors would die for. Oracle could, if they wished, stop that in it's tracks.
Pick your dog in that race but I can tell you that the consumer never wins with a merger.
All of you, especially Vegaman "I can't tell the difference between Java and JavaScript" Dan, need to:
a) Learn some basics about international businss law.
b) Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouths off.
c) Stop repeating crap that is so dumb a five year old should know better.
PS There is no money for the EU in this. This is a merger approval, NOT a prosecution you brain-dead fleawits. Get off your ******* soapbox and shut the ******* up until you have something intelligent to say that has at least five seconds thought put into it.
Does any one really consider Opera a competetior browser to IE? ;) Opera is just a blip on the radar of marketshare. The world has spoken and it's clear they do not want Opera :p While many people do not go past IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are real competetiors... Opera is a lost cause now.
WOW! I thought all of you Europeans were supposed to be so much more civilized than we barbarian Americans. I guess my ignorance in European civilities can be excused ;)
I'm sure there's a lot of Chinese companies that do business in Europe... when are you guys going to start getting on to them for tainted milk, slave labor, censorship, oppression and all those other things that would not make you want to live and work in China? Why do you guys seem to only want to sue high profile, highly profitable US companies?
Perhaps it's time the US start suing EU companies... maybe we don't approve of a Volkswagen / Porsche merger. Maybe we should sue to stop that since both companies do business here.
If there is no money in the EU, then where does all those millions and millions and millions they swindle out of Microsoft go? Do EU companies get it or what? For real, Opera is free and still no one downloads it? Why? Firefox is free, Chrome is free, Safari is free and people download those browsers like hot cakes. Why does Microsoft have to reward Opera for it's crappy browser? The EU is just your guys national little mafia to steal and swindle money from US companies while turning a blind eye to the practices in China.
If you'd ever bothered to read the judgements instead of pulling assumptions out of your arse you'd know that the fines on MS and Intel are the exact same amount by which monetary contributions by EU member states are being reduced for all states in Europe. The money is passed directly on to all the countries in the EU which in turn can pass that reduction on to their citizens.
In short: the money from the fines goes to the citizens of the EU. Are we quite clear on this? They are not being passed to Opera or AMD. Not. I don't care what the little elves are telling you.
As is usual, you idiots expect others to do not only their own research but yours as well. Damned entitlement w *****, lazy to the bone.
Following on. Stop comparing apples and oranges.
In case 1 we have an international corporation which is _based_ in the USA and operates in the EU merging with a similarly large corporation in a manner which DIRECTLY AFFECTS THE EU. This, in international law, puts this merger under EU jurisdiction insofar as the corporation wants to continue operating in the EU.
In case 2 we have interfering with the laws of a SOVEREIGN COUNTRY, China, which no matter how diabolical the regime is _illegal_ under international law so long as that country is not a threat to your own. Something your own government could do with learning.
So, hows about you:
a) Learn some international law.
b) Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off.
c) Stop repeating crap that is so dumb a five year old should know better.
Yes, I'm repeating myself, especially with:
b) Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off.
because it obviously hasn't sunk in. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off. Learn where the money goes before shooting your ignorant dumb mouth off.
"Why do you guys seem to only want to sue high profile, highly profitable US companies?"
Has it ever occurred to you that there are cases involving smaller/lesser known companies that don't make 5,000 column inches because they're not big companies? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6383913.stm Could it be? Three out of the four firms are European? Of course I can almost guarantee you'll forget this one in seconds, it doesn't fit your agenda. After all, if you're so set on it you don't even type the words 'eu' and 'fine' into a search engine I doubt you have any interest in actually having your questions answered.
http://euobserver.com/9/28434 You miss this one too?
http://www.telecomsinsight.com/file/46457/telefnica-faces-eu-fine-for-broadband-bullying.html American or Spanish? You tell me.
http://www.just-auto.com/article.aspx?id=100182 French.
This is entry level research. Either you're too lazy to do it or you won't because it doesn't suit your agenda. By your bonehead logic, no-one who's not famous ever gets shot because it doesn't make the front page of the New York Post.
"Perhaps it's time the US start suing EU companies... maybe we don't approve of a Volkswagen / Porsche merger. Maybe we should sue to stop that since both companies do business here."
You do, you ignorant dossbag. http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices/7972898-1.html EU company buying American.
Now, do you have any more questions that _can't_ be answered by sticking simple words like 'doj', 'block', 'merger' and 'european' into a search engine or are you too useless to even do that?
My question was not: Why can the EU stop a US business from operating in the EU? My question was: Why can they stop the merger of US companies? Mergers between large corporations often end up with some subsidiaries operating outside the newly merged company because of regulatory issues. This is probably never desirable to the business, but the merger still happens.
Does the EU really have this authority?
It is time for the US to start doing damage to EU companies as retaliation.
I repeat: If anyone had two brain cells to rub together at Oracle and Sun, they should have know at the time they struck the deal that this was inevitable, just as the time the DoJ took was. It's the cost of doing business at this scale.
As it is, it took time for the DoJ to approve this merger and, given the DoJ's history of rolling over for big corporations, expecting the EU to just rubber stamp the merger on the basis of their approval doesn't make sense.
Lucky for Novell, they don't think like you. "Duuur, we only do network controlling operating systems, this Linux thing is too radically different from what we do and it's in a different sector, let's not bother."
Wow, you really aren't very bright.
I guess Brocade shouldn't have bothered buying Foundry because they are not in the same business. Oh wait, they are a perfect compliment to each other.
Bloody entitlement ******.
That is the most intelligent post you have made so far. Now you are seeing our side of things.
If you want to trade in the EU then you are subject to EU laws. Only a region run by complete morons like, oh, Mexico would just let foreign companies do business on their home turf without any restriction. If you don't like it, I believe the phrase is 'get bent'.
Oracle can basically kill MySQL or slow down development if it wants to do so, as MySQL is not just some loose-knit project of people submitting code and support isn't just some voluntary mailing list type of the support . This means that business people and management that were about to accept MySQL for wider use can now have a doubts about MySQL future and any forks wont help unless somebody starts a fork that will have trustworthy organization behind it in big corporate mentality.
This one makes no sense. MySQL doesn't compete with high end enterprise Oracle database (or for that matter, IBM or SAP databases). It DOES compete with low end Microsoft databases!
The irony of this delay is that the Commission is permitting greater concentration in high end work groups servers, since the 'doubt' about Sun is leading to picking off custoemrs by HP and IBM. That -- more than the focus on whether MySQL amounts to anything -- is the real story here!
But when large organisations use MySQL, they are actually using Oracle's innodb engine aquired from MySQL a long time ago. Oracle could not squash MySQL just through innodb because there are always alternatives out there. Furthermore, Oracle could embrase MySQL and it's customers. The customer base of MySQL is so large that converting less than 5% of them to Oracle would have covered the entire acquisition cost of Sun over 5 years.
It makes certainly does make good business sence (not counting that the other 95% could be interested in other products and services that Oracle can provide).
While MySQL maybe available for all to fork, only Sun owns the MySQL brand. Ask the other main open source database vendors, Ingres and PostgreSQL, how valuable the MySQL brand is.
Just because MySQL may not compete directly with Oracle today, it's doesn't mean it should/does not have aspirations to compete with it in the future. Are people really suggesting the open source database vendors should not compete in the enterprise database market, leaving it for the proprietary database incumbents: Oracle, IBM and Microsoft? I hope not.
- by rishabghosh September 17, 2009 4:15 PM PDT
- Matt, it is pretty hilarious to see Gartner being quoted as saying that "the EU doesn't understand open source". I remember being an invited speaker at Gartner's first open source summit... in 2006! Red Hat's Werner Knoblich opened his talk with an entertaining set of Gartner's hopelessly ignorant predictions about the irrelevance of open source, while appreciating that Gartner finally realises it's not going away.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(43 Comments)On the deal itself - note that Marten Mickos may be sanguine (and completely speculative) about all the great things Oracle might do for MySQL but founder Monty Widenius is not: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/07/helping-us-department-of-justice.html
As Monty notes, one reason for concern is that Oracle has been conspicuously silent in public and in private about its plans for MySQL, while having discussed at some length its plans for Sun's hardware, Java and other software units.
That said, any delays caused by this investigation are likely to harm Sun, which supports open source in many other, perhaps more important ways than just through its ownership of MySQL. Think of Openoffice, which won't do well if Sun disappears.
-Rishab