The European Union is investigating agreement between Oracle and Sun

European Union regulators Thursday launched an antitrust investigation of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. for the U.S. software maker Oracle Corp., saying they wanted to ensure that Oracle was committed to developing the MySQL open source software, created by Sun.

The adoption of the EU is now the biggest obstacle to the agreement of 7,400 million, already approved by the Justice Department in the USA.
The European Commission now has 90 working days until 19 January 2010 to make a final decision on whether to approve or reject the merger. The committee often puts pressure on companies to make changes antitrust and sell parts of the company.
The Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Thursday that regulators needed to examine the effect of the agreement in which "the world's largest database of private code The acquisition of the world's largest database of open source."

He said the EU executive wanted to ensure that users do not have fewer choices and higher prices as a result of the merger, and that open source software continues to provide competition to companies that develop their own codes and not shared with other .

EU officials said they planned to look closely at the MySQL, an open source product that is popular among companies based on the Internet. They say that MySQL will present a growing competition to the database software from Oracle, to add capacity and thus attract more users.

He said he planned to examine "the incentive to develop more MySQL Oracle as a database of open source."

Kroes said it is important that users can choose between open source and private source.