EU approves Oracle's bid for Sun Microsystems

(BRUSSELS) - Brussels regulators on Thursday approved US business software giant Oracle's bid for hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems, saying the deal would not skew the market in Europe.

A major concern for EU competition watchdogs was the effect the takeover would have on the open source database market -- which means freely-accessed software for millions of business users.

The European Commission had been investigating since September last year whether Oracle would continue to push a Sun software option that is free despite it potentially affecting Oracle's paid-for alternatives.

However, it accepted proposals made by Oracle in the wake of the probe and a spokesman said on Thursday that "Oracle has already taken steps to implement some of its pledges."

Oracle promised to continue to support, develop and provide MySQL technology.

The 5.17-billion-euro (7.57-billion-dollar) deal for Sun, a one-time Silicon Valley star and developer of the popular Java programming language, was approved by Sun shareholders in July and the US Department of Justice in August.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

"Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalise important assets and create new and innovative products."

Concessions by Oracle included the company's extension for up to five years of the terms and conditions of existing commercial licenses.

Sun were responsible for the world's leading open source database MySQL, whereas Oracle is the world's leading proprietary database vendor.

Oracle, IBM and Microsoft control about 85 percent of the market in terms of revenue. Sun's revenue share was low given users download and use the database software for free.

Nevertheless, MySQL is a data management system used in millions of business networks worldwide.

Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd said the commission was concerned whether Oracle would have an "incentive" to "degrade" MySQL's "potential to constrain" Oracle's business.

But the investigation found that in the high end of the market, competition primarily came from other proprietary database solutions.