Another voice heard on the European Commission's objection to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. This time, Eben Moglen has weighed in with an analysis of the objections related to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). Moglen disagrees with the commission, and says that the GPLv2 is sufficient to protect the MySQL community apart from Oracle.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has made it clear that he is not prepared to spin off Sun's MySQL business in an attempt to placate the European Commission investigation of competition issues with Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun.

According to the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU's interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework. FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week.

After the European Commission approved Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun, it only took a few hours for an internal memo to go out from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, announcing that he is resigning. discussing the impact that change in control will have on Sun.

Karsten Gerloff, president of lobby group Free Software Foundation Europe, said the ongoing Microsoft arrangement was a "disgrace" for the European Commission (EC).
"It's astounding that every single agreement between the Commission and Microsoft since 1993 has been concluded without a public call for tender," he said.

"Following its investigation of Opera Software ASA’s antitrust complaint, the European Commission confirmed today that it sent Microsoft a Statement of Objections yesterday, accusing it of illegally tying Internet Explorer to the Windows PC operating system..."

FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week. In the following paragraphs they analyse the BSA's arguments and explain why their claims are false, and why Open Standards are key to interoperability and competition in the European software market.

Meeting Will Bring Together Prominent Lawyers of the Free and Open Source Software Community and Provide Free Legal Education to the Public