Gavin Clarke writes, "If there is a regulatory catch, though, it's likely to have been the fact Java will be owned and licensed by one of the largest Java vendors. The catch would be the terms and conditions Oracle made Java available under."

I would find it quite funny the E.U. could be concerned over the Java licensing as an unfair market advantage while IBM did not see sufficient value in Java (since IBM originally offered an original acceptable asking price, that was later reduced, to a price which was ultimately rejected.)

If companies like IBM cries & complains now, it would be more sour grapes, since they did not see the market value to buy Sun when they were available.

I guess we will see whether politicians in the E.U. perceive a higher value in Sun than the [hopefully] technically minded management in the market do.

Lobbying the EU is just harder and slower. Java is indeed a good question like MySQL too.

No doubt about the end result but perhaps there are some texts to evaluate.

The papers are reporting a magnitude 7.0 quake just off the shore of Java. Maybe the EU bureautwats have misunderstood something?

"On databases, while Oracle might have dominant market share in RDBMS, this remains a relatively diverse market while MySQL largely plays in a different segment."

Sure, MySQL is now 'forked'. However the name MySQL and the brand still exists as well as its 'fanbois'.

Its interesting that this hasn't been made more of an issue since Oracle is the 800lb gorilla and MySQL, while playing in a different segment adds more to their hold on the database market.

MySQL on the low end with a migration path to Oracle on the high? This leads to niche markets for other players...

The Java issue is just a head fake.

Sun is/was a steal, except what will be left. Do not expect this to close by Oracle world which was their hope. Nothing will be left by the time the EU approves this garage sale. All the good people are leaving and the bottom 50% are being RIF'd.

The SPARC line was down 36% last qtr, STK down 23%, Tape down 18%, not sure what other is but other systems products ($434M) down 66% and other storage ($30M) down 48%. The disaster is only lessened by every customer signing up for 5 year maintenance agreements because Oracle has a history of 47% price increases (bea weblogic) and killing products. (virtual iron)

....cheers from the UK

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1271&format=HTML

Curiously the stumbling block is MySQL, not Java...