http://www.eweek.com/…

Two software industry groups, along with free and open-source software community leader Richard Stallman, said Oct. 19 they are opposed to Oracle’s planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems and urged European Commission regulators to block the $7.4 billion deal.

If the transaction, which was announced April 20 and approved Aug. 20 by the U.S. Department of Justice as not being against federal antitrust laws, is sanctioned by the EC, Oracle—through ownership of Sun—will have control of the key maintainers of the popular MySQL database, who work at Sun.

The Open Rights Group, a digital civil liberties organization, Knowledge Ecology International and Stallman told the EC’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes in a co-written letter dated Oct. 19 that they are concerned about Oracle’s possible squashing of competition in the database market.

“If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development of the functionality and performance of the MySQL software platform, leading to profound harm to those who use MySQL software to power applications,” they wrote.

Stallman and the other open-source community activists contend that Oracle’s ownership will hinder development of the popular open-source database, which relies heavily on volunteer contributions of time and talent.

1) How could forcing a failing company to stay independent help an open source product they own? It’s open source. They aren’t needed. Even if Oracle drops all support and development of MySQL… how is that different from Sun going under?

2) By stopping the acquisition they are by definition limiting competition. Sun is a failed company. They lost. They couldn’t compete. Allowing a successful firm to buy up the good parts of a failed firm is part of what makes the market work.

3) As mentioned many times before… if RMS wants real freedom he’d be opposed to copyleft which relies on copyright and government enforced monopoly privileges on non-scarce, non-tangible, fully fungible, unalienable concepts.

4) The means to freedom is not increased tyranny.

Related posts:

  1. Richard Stallman talks with Alex Jones
  2. How Richard Stallman’s GPL Platform Backfires on the Free Software Movement
  3. New Zealand patent reform bill kills software patents
  4. More antitrust BS: IBM faces DOJ antitrust inquiry on mainframes
  5. You can’t have it both ways: FSF not happy with Amazon’s usage of FOSS

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