Dan Sholler

I just saw that the EU had opened and investigation into the purchase of Sun by Oracle from a competitive practice standpoint.  I am not a lawyer, and am not an expert in anti-trust law, especially in Europe, but it seems to me that this case raises some very serious and interesting questions about the role of open source, and about the software industry in general.

My recollection is that similar cases in the US the litmus test for something being anti-competitive was that the concentration in the market had negative effects on the consumer. In most cases, those effects were seen in terms of higher prices for goods and services compared to what would be expected in a competitive market.  However, since clearly MySQL is a big part of this question.. one wonders what the standard will be for open source? Can open source ever be anti-competitive? Clearly there is not way to use the price standard as a means of proving this.

One thought would then be that instead of using license pricing as the basis, they could use maintenance pricing. However, if a regulator were to take that view, that would call into question virtually all software maintenance, except for the small portion that is based on open source offerings.

Because of these potentially wide ranging impacts this investigation certainly bears watching. In all likelihood, nothing will change. After all, there are several competitors out there with significant market share for databases, other than Oracle and MySQL. However, there is a small chance that we might have a major shift in the software business model.

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