The following is a letter that KEI, Richard Stallman ORG have sent to the European Commission, asking the European Commission to prevent Oracle from acquiring MySQL as part of its acquisition of Sun. The European Commission has the authority to require a divestiture of MySQL, so that it would not be part of the merger, in order to ensure that MySQL would operate independently, or be sold to a different company that would not face the same conflicts as Oracle does. http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql <snip> KEI sees the MySQL acquisition as an important precedent for the application of competition laws to free software. Traditional market analysis looks at revenue based market shares, which are meaningless for software distributed gratis or licensed under prices that reflect fees for services. Many important free software services are supported by some type of commercial business model, and can be fragile, if acquired by a firm that has an interest in diluting or destroying the longer run viability of the free software project. </snip> <snip> We recognize the support Sun provides to increase competition in numerous markets through its support of FLOSS and open standards. We also recognize that Oracle's acquisition of Sun may be essential for Sun's survival. However, Oracle should not be allowed to harm consumer interests in the database market by weakening the competition provided by MySQL. For the reasons elucidated above, we ask that you block Oracle's acquisition of MySQL. </snip> http://www.keionline.org/ec-mysql -- "[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and 'nonnumerical' algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information." - Donald Knuth