Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

It seems the European Union has objected to the merger of Sun and Oracle. Their reason? It's based on the idea that Oracle having control over MySQL will have negative ramifications for competition.

I must say - the EU is being ridiculous.

I'm not sure where everyone got this idea that MySQL was the only open source database in the world. PostreSQL is very highly regarded, and often supports features before MySQL. Apache Derby is another big powerful database engine, originally developed by IBM.  If you want smaller databases, there's HSQLDB for Java,. SQLite for C/C++ and C-based interpreted languages (such as Ruby), and even a plethora of non-SQL based database engines.

It seems to me there's plenty of competition, and plenty of alternatives. Quite honestly, even if (heaven forbid) Oracle were to completely squash MySQL entirely (something I don't think they can do if someone simply forced the source), what would the greater impact be? Nothing. All those LAMP platform out there could very easily just shift over to another open source database engine, no big deal.

That leaves one with these questions:

• did the EU commission actually investigate this matter? It seems very much more like a hastily drawn conclusion they've come to.
• if they did investigate this, then they must have to come to the realisation that there's plenty of alternatives out there. If this is the case, what is their real agenda here?

Something stinks here.