The Sun Oracle deal, which was supposed to take place long ago, is  still not finalized because of the European Commission and its antitrust issues with the deal. The deal, which was initially valued at $7.4 billion is fast losing value and is proving to be a loss, for both the companies.

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The European Commission is especially worried that the deal would discourage competition in the database industry, as both Sun Microsystems and Oracle currently own popular database product of their own, namely the MySQL and Oracle database. While the Oracle database is more popular for database servers and financial services in company networks, the MySQL database is extremely popular as a database for web-servers. They are vastly unrelated and cater to two different sections of database users.

In the midst of all this, Sun is cutting out on its services like Zembly, laying off employees(3000 of them planned for the next few days) and alike. Basically, it is doing everything it can to stay alive in the face of this disaster. Inspite of all this, investors and even customers are backing out of the company. This is pushing Sun Microsystems into even bigger losses.

All this fuss over a database which is Open Source! My question is, why is the European Commission so interested in a saving a database which is Open Source and can as well, survive with help from the much larger Open Source community? With Sun Microsystems going down so badly, will preventing the acquisition help MySQL in any way at all?  What is the open-source community’s response to this? Where are the MySQL developers and what is their take on this?