The European Commission has decided: Oracle can have Sun and MySQL. However, some opponents still not admit defeat and we will see why...
For opponents of the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle, the purchasing company would still need clearance from the Chinese and Russian "antitrust authorities" before getting a legitimate status. And this is precisely the reason why we "should not consider this process as finished", according to Florian Mueller. However, we can notice that Oracle has no significant sales in those two countries so that Europe and America seem to be much more concerned. This point is to be continued...
PostgreSQL, the future of MySQL? - But, another reason not to admit defeat is that it seems that there is some future to MySQL. This future is named PostgreSQL; according to the European Commission. The EC implied that PostgreSQL could be the active competitor of the Open Source field to MySQL. PostgreSQL "is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market," reads the EC announcement on the 21st of January.
MySQL is still Open Source - Moreover, the EC reminds everyone that MySQL is Open Source and as a consequence, each developer who does not belong to Oracle can keep on working on it and can possibly make something even more competitive with it. Even if Oracle would stop MySQL production, it would not announce its death. Clearly, according to the EC, Oracle does not acquire the intellectual property of the database but only its management.
Let's see what happens next...
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