MySQL Founder and EU wants Oracle to sell MySQL

Despite all the assurance give by Larry, EU is left unconvinced that Oracle is a  safe house for MySQL, the database that drives 25% of the market.

EU Commission is looking at Oracle’s takeover of Sun for a while and had been, officially, the biggest hurdle in Sun-Oracle merger.

Monty Widenius, one of the co-founders of MySQL, issued a statement Monday that goes in hand with European Commission’s concern: the deal will reduce competitiveness between database vendors, suggesting that Oracle should sell MySQL, a move that would demonstrate to regulators and the market that the acquisition is not going to erode choice.

Widenius, out of frustration, launched his own company: Monty Program Ab, in order to focus on developing his own MySQL fork called MariaDB. He also founded the Open Database Alliance which consists of independent vendors that provide services relating to MySQL or develop various forks. Widenius has previously said that the organization could potentially help create a more transparent and community-driven development environment for moving the open source database forward in collaboration with Oracle. In his latest statement, he takes a much stronger position and calls for Oracle to turn over development entirely to someone else by selling MySQL.

“Oracle should be constructive and commit to sell MySQL to a suitable third party, enabling an instant solution instead of letting Sun suffer much longer,” he wrote. “MySQL needs a different home than Oracle, a home where there will be no conflicts of interest concerning how, or if, MySQL should be developed further.”

A spokesman for Competition Commissioner ‘Steelie’ Neelie Kroes said the Commissioner had:

“expressed disappointment that Oracle had failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or, alternatively, proposals for a remedy to the competition problems identified by the Commission”.

The comments were made to Oracle president Safra Catz during a meeting in Brussels. The EC said it was happy to move quickly to approve the deal, provided its concerns over MySQL were met.

Here’s a line from one of that EU strategist’s press releases that shows that he not only fears competition but can also read minds:

“Every day that passes without Oracle excluding MySQL from the deal is further evidence that Oracle just wants to get rid of its open source challenger and that the EU’s investigation is needed to safeguard innovation and customer choice. This is highly critical because the entire knowledge-based economy is built on databases.”

Oh, so that’s what this is all about: what looked like a cheap attempt to exploit Oracle is actually a selfless effort to save “the entire knowledge-based economy”—who wouldn’t support such a heroic effort?

What remains

Without further reassurance the Commission could block the takeover or at least order Oracle to sell off the free database business first, just like Widenius wants it.

As per Larry, Sun is losing Billion $ every month, acquisition needs to happen fast. But unless the demands are met, it just won’t happen. And world’s most popular Open Source database is at mercy of the regulators.

Credits: ars, InfoWeek, Widenius’s blog