Oracle-Sun merger approved

European Commission has approved the merger of IT companies Oracle and Sun Microsystems, which should enable creation of a new global software giant.

The Commission first had doubts in the legality of Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the European Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, estimated in the end that the market competition and innovation would be preserved on all the markets concerned.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun and its famous open-source database MySQL was earlier approved by the US authorities. The European Commission gave consent for that transaction worth 7.4 billion USD after taking in account Oracle's obligation to resume development of open-source versions of MySQL.