The European Commission ruled today that Oracle could have more time to respond to anti-trust concerns over the attempt to purchase Sun Microsystems, Inc. for $8.1 billion.
The issue for the Commission is the merger’s impact on competition in the database market. If Oracle purchases Sun, they’ll also get the open source MySQL database.
The US Department of Justice already approved the deal. Responding to the EC news, the department released its own statement saying that the merger is “unlikely to be anticompetitive.”
According to Oracle, there is plenty of competition with IBM, Microsoft, Sybase, and three distinct open source database vendors.
“There is no basis in European law for objecting to a merger of two among eight firms selling differentiated products,” said the Oracle press release.
