In a move to get approval from the European Commission, Oracle has engaged in discussions with the commission regarding the concerns expressed by the antitrust regulator about the Oracle/Sun Microsystems transaction.
Oracle’s $7.4bn bid for Sun has met a stumbling block in the EU, as European antitrust regulators raised concerns that database competition could be damaged, specifically that Sun’s MySQL competed directly with Oracle databases.
In order to further reassure the commission, Oracle gave commitments on continued availability of storage engine APIs; non-assertion and license; to enhance MySQL in the future under the GPL; increase spending on MySQL research and development; MySQL customer advisory board; MySQL storage engine vendor advisory board; MySQL reference manual; and preserve customer choice for support.
The company said that it will maintain and periodically enhance MySQL’s pluggable storage engine architecture to allow users the flexibility to choose from a portfolio of native and third party supplied storage engines.
Oracle said that it will continue to enhance MySQL and make subsequent versions of MySQL, including version 6, available under the GPL.
In addition, Oracle said that it will not release any new, enhanced version of MySQL enterprise edition without contemporaneously releasing a new, enhanced version of MySQL community edition licensed under the GPL. The company added that it will continue to make the source code of all versions of MySQL community edition.
