The Department of Justice has extended its investigation into Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems.
The 30-day period to review the deal was set to expire on Friday. The Department of Justice has asked the companies to provide additional information related to the licensing of Sun’s Java software language.
Dan Wall, an attorney with Latham & Watkins who counsels Oracle, said: We’ve had a very good dialogue with the Department of Justice and we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline.
“All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed that is never going to get in the way of the deal. I fully expect that the investigation will end soon and not delay the closing of the deal this summer.
Oracle has agreed to buy Sun in April, shortly after IBM has abandoned its bid to buy the software developer.
Once the pending acquisition is closed, Oracle intends to focus on the server and storage businesses and develop software-optimised hardware that integrates its enterprise components, hardware, database, middleware and applications.
