Larry Ellison’s Oracle won an all-clear from Europe’s top antitrust official to proceed with its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems after reaching a verbal agreement to protect a piece of software at the heart of a months-long dispute.
According to a person with direct knowledge of the talks, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes approved the deal after Oracle agreed to fund the open database software, dubbed MySQL, for the next three years at more than $24 million annually.
At the same time, Oracle will form an advisory group of MySQL customers.
Kroes is expected to write a clearance decision over the next few weeks and circulate it to member states, with final approval due in mid-January, the source said. The Oracle-Sun tie-up has already received US regulatory and shareholder approval.
The peaceful, last-minute resolution draws to a close the pitched battle between Ellison, the third-richest American, and the Europeans, who were threatening to kill the deal that was first unveiled in April.
At one point, Ellison vowed to “vigorously oppose” the European Commission’s demands, but as recently as two weeks ago, as The Post reported, there were signs he might be willing to bend.
Yesterday’s agreement enables Ellison to claim he didn’t officially back down because the company wasn’t required to make a legal commitment to protect MySQL, the source said.
“The EC has basically abandoned its position,” the source said.
At issue were worries among the Europeans that Oracle would fold MySQL, giving the company’s rival software product a boost. The Europeans had demanded that Oracle give them a legal commitment to protecting MySQL, something Oracle resisted throughout the talks.
Oracle declined to comment.