On Friday 2nd July, Monty Widenius, founder of open source database company MySQL, owned by Sun, filed an appeal against the European Commission’s unconditional clearance of the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
The main affected area in this case was the database market. This market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database vendors, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, accounting for approximately 85% of the market in terms of revenue, according to the Commission’s estimates. Although MySQL accounted for a tiny share of the market, the Commission was concerned that MySQL represented, given its open source nature, an important competitive force and that its elimi [...]
