European Commision and Oracle

Not looking so good for Oracle-Sun merger. The EC issued it's statement of objections, a formal sheet spelling out its concerns, to the merger. EC has to rule by mid-January whether it will clear or block the deal. The EC's deputy director general for mergers and antitrust, said at a Washington antitrust conference that no final decision had been made on the deal, and confirmed that the commission's key concern centered on Sun's open-source MySQL database software and its potential combination with software sold by Oracle.

A quick look at the MySQL case studies will show why Oracle would not want to give it up. Telephone companies (specially European ones), cable companies, craigslist, Yahoo, Ticketmaster are some of the more notable.