| By Maureen O'Gara |
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| December 6, 2009 06:30 PM EST |
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14,796 |
Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer
Oracle has told Reuters that the New York Post story Friday claiming it had offered the European Commission a deal on MySQL is a bunch of baloney.
The Post, quoting two unidentified sources, said Oracle proposed to “quarantine” MySQL inside a combined Oracle-Sun to get the European Commission to approve its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun ahead of a hearing in Brussels Thursday.
It said MySQL would be treated as a “separate entity” with a “firewall” between the open source database unit and the rest of Oracle and could even involve a separate board.
A Post source said it was “the only way to get the deal done.”
According to Reuters an Oracle spokeswoman said, “The New York Post article is completely untrue.”
The Post said Oracle did not return its calls ahead of its running the story.
Oracle has previously vowed to get the Sun acquisition cleared by the EC regulators without condition. The planned merger has been dragging on since April at great cost to Sun.
Reuters says Oracle responded Friday to the EC’s statement of objections.
Friday was the last possible day it could reply after the Commission extended the deadline at Oracle’s behest so the company could “further develop its arguments.”
Those arguments now presumably include Eben Moglin, the primary legal delineator of the GPL, the open source license under which the dual-license MySQL code is distributed, telling the EC that its anti-competitive concerns are based on “factual assertions made by others to the Commission which are demonstrably incorrect.”
Those who oppose Oracle owning MySQL including MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius have indicated that any compromise short of divestiture is unacceptable. They claim MySQL deserves “an economic entity behind it that has every possible incentive to compete with Oracle’s core business and has no inhibitions in that regard.”
Oracle, in turn, claims MySQL doesn’t compete directly against its database interests and that it wants to keep MySQL to compete against Microsoft’s SQL Server.
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