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Oracle's pledges on MySQL are 'purely cosmetic', say critics
Oracle's ten promises to the European Commission will expire five years after the deal is completed, the company said
Oracle's latest commitments designed to address the European Commission's concerns regarding its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the MySQL database are paper thin, and even if they were confirmed they wouldn't safeguard MySQL's future, said Florian Mueller, an outspoken critic of the deal, on Monday.
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His comments followed an announcement by the Commission earlier Monday that Oracle has agreed to make a series of undertakings to customers, developers and users of MySQL, which the Commission described as "an important new element to be taken into account" in its antitrust investigation of the merger with Sun.
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The Commission has held up Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun because it believed that the deal would harm competition in the database software market, currently dominated by Oracle.
Oracle made the new commitments during negotiations with Commission merger officials believed to have taken place over the weekend.
They include "binding contractual undertakings to storage engine vendors regarding copyright nonassertion and the extension over a period of up to 5 years of the terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses," the Commission said, describing the new undertakings as "significant new facts".
Among those dismissive of the database giant's promises was Mueller, who once worked for MySQL and is close to Michael "Monty" Widenius, a founder of the open source database company who objects to it being owned by Oracle.
Mueller described Oracle's proposals in an email as "purely cosmetic and totally ineffectual, not preventing the near-instantaneous cessation of innovation in and around MySQL because neither enterprise users nor storage engine vendors nor forkers -- developers of products derived from the MySQL code base -- would have a secure future and real incentive to invest."
The five-year extension of terms and conditions of existing MySQL licensees is insufficient, he added in a follow-up phone conversation.
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