More calls on EU to green light Oracle-Sun deal

Oracle announced its intention to buy Sun in April

Open source business intelligence firm, Jaspersoft, has sent a letter to EU regulators urging them to approve Oracle's $7.4bn (£4.5bn) acquisition of Sun Microsystems before January.

Addressed to EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, the letter argues that EU concerns that the takeover will create a less competitive and less innovative market are unfounded. The deal would see Oracle, the world's biggest proprietary database supplier, becoming the owner of the highly popular open-source database MySQL.

Oracle will not be able to stifle competition in the open source market, said Jaspersoft chief executive Brian Gentile, because barriers to entry have been lowered.

“The software and technology market has grown far too dynamic to allow one acquisition to stifle competition. In this new marketplace, nearly anyone can create software with little upfront cost and then compete with even the most entrenched players,” said Gentile in the letter, which can be read on his blog.

Oracle itself similarly attacked the EU’s principal antitrust objection earlier this month.

“The commission's statement of objection reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open-source dynamics,” Oracle said at the time.

“It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open-source software that because MySQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source.”

Jaspersoft is a gold partner with MySQL and supports Oracle platforms. Today’s letter from Gentile urging the EU to back the deal follows the UK Oracle User Group declaring its support for the acquisition on Friday.

The UK Oracle User Group said MySQL should not be the main concern of Brussels, arguing that future support for Java and Sun hardware was a more important issue.

"Uncertainty over the future of Java risks our members' investments in both Oracle technologies and in developed applications," said the user group's chairman, Ronan Miles.

The EU's concerns are listed as a Statement of Objections issued on 9 November. Oracle is requested to respond to the objections by 27 January.