| By Maureen O'Gara |
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| January 18, 2010 12:15 PM EST |
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13,061 |
Intellectual Property on Ulitzer
It's apparently all over but the shouting at Oracle and Sun.
The European Commission is reportedly supposed to wave Sun's acquisition through on January 19.
In the process it'll have to explain how it came to change its mind after needlessly costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs - well, at least that's the Oracle-Sun story.
We always figured Oracle would have had to can those people anyway to wring $1.5 billion in operating profits out of the joint like it said it would. And now UBS analyst Brent Thill says it'll fire ~13,800 Sun people in the next few weeks.
Okay, one thing at a time. Remember that Oracle impugned the EC's honor and accused it of twisting, cherry-picking and ignoring evidence it collected during its antitrust investigation of the merger to match its open source biases.
Oracle even brought big company witnesses to Brussels to tell the EC to its face that their opinions of potential competitive harm was not what the EC represented them to be.
Well, the EC can't very well acknowledge that Oracle had it by the short hairs and that - if it didn't go along with the merger - Oracle could have made a stink that might have weakened its structure as judge, jury and executioner now can it?
That's where the Oracle-provided wallpaper comes in. The 10 promises about MySQL that Oracle made after the hearing in December handed the EC its cover story. It can plead "new facts" in the case.
Ironically, the EC's advisory committee of the 27 national EU regulators that met this week to vote on the acquisition reportedly wanted the EC to say that, in the end, its case wasn't strong enough rather than position Oracle's undertakings as "new facts" that changed the game. It's assumed the EC won't follow that advice.
Anyway, that hurdle all but cleared, what's Oracle gonna do once it's out of the valley of the shadow of death, so to speak?
Well, from the beginning Larry claimed that the real reason he wanted Sun was Java. In that case he's got a little problem percolating in Javaville and it involves Google. It'll be curious to see what happens.
Since the EC tied the Oracle-Sun acquisition up in knots, Google has been trying to buy On2, which gives Java FX, the embedded Java widgetry that Larry has said he's interested in making a buck off of, its cross-platform encoding and hardware-based decoding audio/video competency, a facility that extends to browsers and desktops. It's unique.
Google offered 60 cents a share for the company last year and, although management appeared to be willing the underwater stockholders weren't, and so Google had to go to 75 cents, a measly $126 million in chump change, a few days ago.
The situation is up-in-the-air and likely to remain there for another month - enough time for Oracle to barge in and make sure that Google doesn't proprietize the technology for its own phones and netbooks. Or at least that's the presumption. Google hasn't said what it wants the stuff for and Java desperately needs it.
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