EU warms to Oracle's $7 billion purchase of Sun | Reuters

Description

EU regulators signaled they could clear Oracle Corp's $7 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems Inc, after the U.S. software company promised measures to ease competition concerns.

Oracle promised on Monday to keep the market open for others to make storage engine software for the MySQL database, said that it would be more open than MySQL's previous owners, and would not ask for commercial licenses from makers of MySQL storage engines for application programing interfaces.

Oracle also said it would invest more in MySQL research and development over the next three years than Sun has, and said it would set up a separate customer advisory board of MySQL users.

The Commission said in a statement that Oracle's binding contractual undertakings were "significant new facts."

"Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes ... is optimistic that the case will have a satisfactory outcome, while ensuring that the transaction will not have an adverse impact on effective competition in the European database market," it said.

Original URL

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BD0XG20091214

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BD0XG20091214