NewsFrance's Nexedi Offers to Buy MySQL for 1 Euro

France’s Nexedi Offers to Buy MySQL for 1 Euro

On Monday, Nexedi Chief Executive Officer Jean-Paul Smets sent a public letter to the European Commission recommending that if Oracle is allowed to purchase Sun Microsystems, that MySQL should be sold to a third-party.

Smets offered 1 euro for the MySQL Business Unit in order to “relieve Oracle from what has become both a negative asset in its merger and acquisition strategy, and a negative asset to the open source and Free Software communities.”

What Nexedi is worried about is their ERP5 product. ERP5 is an enterprise resource planning application based on MySQL. Smets said that using MySQL gives his company a key advantage over the competition.

According to Smets, the MySQL Cluster is particularly important. It’s a version of MySQL based on the high performance NDB engine originally built by Ericsson – it’s the “only open source database engine which provides highly scalable database for very large data sets,” Smets said.

But if Oracle is allowed to purchase Sun, Smets said the situation has changed from MySQL being an asset to now a liability.

“Based on the poor track record of Oracle Corporation with previous acquisitions such as JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and InnoDB,” Smets said, “we consider that the risk is very high that Oracle will destroy the value of MySQL and of its underlying open source technologies in order to promote its own proprietary technologies, both in the field database and in the field of business applications.”

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