The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation under the EU Merger Regulation into the planned acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation
Read the press release
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:
The Commission has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company. In particular, the Commission has an obligation to ensure that customers would not face reduced choice or higher prices as a result of this takeover. [...] The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.
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In its in-depth investigation, the Commission will therefore address a number of issues, including Oracle's incentive to further develop MySQL as an open source database.
You can find even more information.
This makes the deal impossible within this year. The commission now has a final deadline to decide about the merger until 19. Januar 2010.
