Brussels, 21/01/2010 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 21 January, the European Commission gave its unconditional clearance to the acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle Corporation, a US enterprise software company.
This decision was reached by the Commission after an in-depth investigation opened on 3 September 2009. The Commission feared that the acquisition by Sun in 2008 of MySQL, the world's leading open source database (open software is software that can be downloaded and used free of charge) by Oracle, the leading proprietary database vendor, would lead to a significant impediment of effective competition within the EEA. Given the open source nature of MySQL, the Commission also assessed Oracle's ability and incentive to remove the constraint exerted by MySQL after the merger and the extent to which this constraint could, if necessary, be replaced by other actors on the database market. On this point, the investigation showed that another open database, the PostgreSQL, is considered by many users of this kind of software as a credible alternative to MySQL. The Commission also noted that “forks” (software built on the basis of the MySQL code) could also be developed in the future and rapidly put sufficient competitive pressure on Oracle. Given the specificities of the open source software industry, the Commission took into account Oracle's public announcement of 14 December 2009 of a series of pledges to customers, users and developers of MySQL concerning issues such as the continued release of future versions of MySQL under the GPL (General Public Licence) open source licence.
The Commission also examined the potential impact of Oracle's acquisition of the intellectual property (IP) rights connected to the Java development platform in the context of the proposed transaction.
It found that Oracle's ability to deny its competitors access to important IP rights would be limited by the functioning of the Java Community Process (JCP) which is a participative process for developing and revising Java technology specifications involving numerous other important players in the IT industry, including Oracle's competitors.
The Commission also found that Oracle would not have the incentives to restrict its competitors' access to the Java IP rights as this would jeopardise the gains derived from broad adoption of the Java platform and therefore the proposed transaction would raise no competition concerns in respect of the licensing of IP rights connected with Java.
Finally, the Commission also examined the potential effects arising from the proposed transaction on the market for middleware and in the “IT stack”, where the merger would strengthen Oracle's presence.
Taking all these elements into consideration, the Commission concluded that there was a balance that would not have an impact on the database market, and therefore authorised the operation, said Jonathan Todd, Spokesman for Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. (O.L./transl.jl)