The following is a letter that KEI, Richard Stallman ORG have sent to
the European Commission, asking the European Commission to prevent
Oracle from acquiring MySQL as part of its acquisition of Sun. The
European Commission has the authority to require a divestiture of
MySQL, so that it would not be part of the merger, in order to ensure
that MySQL would operate independently, or be sold to a different
company that would not face the same conflicts as Oracle does.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql">http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql</a><br><br><snip><br>KEI sees the MySQL acquisition as an important precedent for the
application of competition laws to free software. Traditional market
analysis looks at revenue based market shares, which are meaningless
for software distributed gratis or licensed under prices that reflect
fees for services. Many important free software services are supported
by some type of commercial business model, and can be fragile, if
acquired by a firm that has an interest in diluting or destroying the
longer run viability of the free software project.<br></snip><br><br><snip><br>We recognize the support Sun provides to increase competition in
numerous markets through its support of FLOSS and open standards. We
also recognize that Oracle's acquisition of Sun may be essential for
Sun's survival. However, Oracle should not be allowed to harm consumer
interests in the database market by weakening the competition provided
by MySQL. For the reasons elucidated above, we ask that you block
Oracle's acquisition of MySQL.<br></snip><br><br><a href="http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql">http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql</a><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>"[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and 'nonnumerical' algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information." - Donald Knuth <br>