A letter to the European Commission

I wrote this letter to the
Competition Commissioner
Neelie Kroes, at the
European Commission.





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Hi Neelie,

The European Commission has delayed the Sun-Oracle deal and it worries me a lot. I have been using Linux/Unix and other Open source software for more than three years now.

I hope that everyone at EC really understand that MySQL,the database purchased by Sun Microsystems, has a licensing policy of GPL, the Gnu Puplic License.
That means that Oracle never can get monopoly on the database market. And MySQL has already been forked to the MariaDB by Michael Widenius, the founder and original developer of MySQL.

Oracles intention is to provide a better integration with their existing database and the excellent operating system Solaris/OpenSolaris of which I'm using at this very moment. They have also expressed their interest in the programming language of Java.

Please do not delay this issue to much, if so EC will probably destroy many years of innovative engineering at Sun. Sun is the company that gave us Java, OpenOffice and now OpenSolaris. Oracle could with Sun Microsystems technical skills, balance the world dominance of Microsoft. OpenSolaris has a big opportunity to be what GNU/Linux never can be. Because GNU/Linux lack a uniting force between a big company and a large community.

There is one book I can recommend you all to read, and it's "The Success of Open Source" by Steven Weber. There everything about GPL and Open source is described in an utterly intelligible way.

Sincerely Jan Ekbom
near Gothenburg, Sweden