COMMENT The mere possibility that a $7.4bn technology merger in California might be blocked by regulators nearly half the world away over a fly-speck of a business shows how odd the dispute over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems has become.
At the centre of this dispute is an open-source software unit of Sun that has annual revenues of only $70m. According to European regulators, in an official complaint issued last week, Oracle’s assumption of the MySQL software could thwart competition for its own, far larger database business. The US Department of Justice, in a clear rebuke to Brussels, pointed out that it had found no problems with the transaction.
