A letter from the European commission regarding the Oracle/Sun merger

3. August 2009

Last week I received a really extensive questionaire from the European commission. They investigate in the case of the Oracle/Sun merger and supplied a long questionaire how Mayflower sees the Oracle/Sun merger. One of the question, for example, is if the quality of InnoDB has increased or declined since Oracle bought Innobase Oy some years ago. I wrote to the commission and asked if I could distribute the two Word documents they delivered to me. Important information: the questionaire has to be sent back until August, 13th!

This is what Vera Pozzato on behalf of the team told me:

Dear Mr. Schotte,

Many thanks for your email and for the interesting information you have provided us with.

As our investigation is a rather extensive and complex exercise, we would appreciate if you could send us, if possible, the contact details (company name, address, telephone number+fax+email address of a contact person) of companies that work with MySQL and Open Source products, and who could be willing to assist us in our investigation.

We would then send the questionnaires ourselves so we can more easily keep track of replies and double-check whether they might have already received our requests for information last week.

Please let us know if this is possible for you and, in any case, do not hesitate to contact us should you have any further queries.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,

Vera Pozzato
On behalf of the case team

Vera Pozzato
European Commission
DG Competition
Directorate C – Information, Communication, Media
Mergers
Tel. +32-2-29-93012
Fax +32-2-29-98588
E-mail vera.pozzato@ec.europa.eu

I encourage everybody who works with MySQL in the OpenSource area to write to Ms. Pozzato and ask for the questionaire. I also encourage you to distribute this content to everybody who is working with MySQL and Open Source products writing E-Mails to Ms. Pozzato and asking for the questionaire.

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Björn Schotte ist geschäftsführender Gesellschafter der Mayflower GmbH und Senior Consultant im Umfeld von Software- und Agilen Organisations-Themen. Er twittert unter @BjoernSchotte und ist auf Xing sowie LinkedIn erreichbar. Seine Vorträge finden sich bei Slideshare.

Kommentare

7 Antworten zu „A letter from the European commission regarding the Oracle/Sun merger“

Arjen Lentz

3. August 2009

Just companies based in the EU, I presume?

On the InnoDB question, I think it has improved. Quite significant developments have been done, so it has by no means been stifled by Oracle. It’s done internally and then published which is unfortunate, but so far they have delivered so based on track records, ok.

Antworten
1. Michael Widenius
  
  5. August 2009
  
  Yes, quality of InnoDB has been good, but since Oracle acquired InnoDB a lot of other things has gone to worse:
  
  – The development phase of new features has slowed down to a crawl
  – Public and contributed patches to InnoDB are incorporated very slowly or not at all.
  – All development is done in secret
  – When you ask Oracle what they future plans are for InnoDB, they only answer you get is ‚We can’t tell; Corporate policy‘
  
  It’s good that Oracle is still doing development on InnoDB, but it’s not functioning as you would expect for an Open Source project.
  
  Antworten
Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

3. August 2009

Jan Wildeboer pointed us to the Mayflower post about their letter from the European Commission. It seems like the the European Commision , more specifically the Directorate General for Competition , really is interested in our input regarding the matter,

Antworten
Henrik Ingo

7. August 2009

Bjorn,

The question is, how should I contact you so you can send our contact info to Ms Pozzato?

You can respond to hingo – askmonty.org

Antworten
Henrik Ingo

9. August 2009

Out of curiosity: In my copy of the questionnaire, they ask about Berkeley DB, not InnoDB. InnoDB is never mentioned. Do we have different questions?

Antworten
gs

16. September 2009

Yes, quality of InnoDB has been good, but since Oracle acquired InnoDB a lot of other things has gone to worse:

– The development phase of new features has slowed down to a crawl
– Public and contributed patches to InnoDB are incorporated very slowly or not at all.
– All development is done in secret
– When you ask Oracle what they future plans are for InnoDB, they only answer you get is ‚We can’t tell; Corporate policy‘

It’s good that Oracle is still doing development on InnoDB, but it’s not functioning as you would expect for an Open Source project.
Just companies based in the EU, I presume? yes.

Antworten
Peter Parker

17. Oktober 2009

A long time now InnoDB has been the only thing that has leveraged the commercial use of MySQL, but it has never really satified the MySQL development team nor the customers, due to it’s performance impacts on MySQL (which is mainly used due to it’s speed). That is why new solutions for recoverability have been actively developed all the while as InnoDB has been shipped (Falcon, Maria, extensions to MyIsam). MySQL AB has made clear that InnoDB was and is only a temporary solution to MySQL’s recoverability- and online-backup shortcomings. This is the truth and an obvious reason why neither Oracle nor anyone else has tried to put anymore costly effort in InnoDB. Now
with Oracle together MySQL has a new chance to become at least a strategic product for web caches etc. in thousands of Oracle projects world-wide and surely there will arise technological synergy over the next years. Oracle has about 10 different database products in the market and each of these is actively promoted as the right solution for the right problem. MySQL hasn’t got any such valuable support by Microsoft or IBM have they ? Delaying the merger will directly cause harm to the MySQL customer base, who will return to Microsoft or IBM, who now tell each and everyone, that all of Sun’s technology stack (inluding MySQL) has no future if the merger is approved.
I will actively help the best I can to protect my customers against these smear campaigns.

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