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I'm confused as to why the European Commission is involved with this at all. Anyone cares to explain? Also, "Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon

• jacquesm 17y ago
  Because the EC is a market in which Oracle intends to make a substantial portion of its income ? Anti-trust actually has some meaning here, it stands for not being able to own a substantial portion of the market and then being able to gobble up your competitors (directly, or, as in this case indirectly). American companies invariably explain this is a lack of 'free market', but it is one of the few cases where I think that some government involvement in business is actually a good thing. The EC got to sharpen it's knives in this respect on a very unwilling telco industry, and they are fairly sharp when it comes to stating how far is too far. Whether Oracle has crossed the line or not in this respect is hard to tell, IBM still has Informix/DB2, there are other open source alternatives but I think a fork of MySQL is another way of resolving this. But then there would have to be a pre-sun style company behind it to give it legs, otherwise corporations would never go for it.
  • whatusername 17y ago
    From the Open Source perspective there is Postgres and the mysql code On the commercial side there is IBM with DB2/Informix and Microsoft with SQL Server This doesn't seem like directly gobbling up your competitors..
    • jacquesm 17y ago
      Oracle, postgres and mysql are not in the same space. That leaves informix/DB2. Not being in the same space is maybe not enough for the anti-trust people though, to them 'databases' are 'databases'.