The SFLC has stated the the opinion was provided “pro bono publico and without fee, at the request of Oracle’s counsel”. That is not the same thing as “arguing Oracle’s case best he can”

The statement from Moglen and the SFLC is not, therefore, a statement from Oracle. Clearly Moglen has discussed the SO and partially quoted it, but Oracle has not.

But did you notice the good news: Apparently Oracle is at liberty to discuss the SO in public and at least partially even quote it. Maybe they could even publish all of it? It is possible since the only reason it is confidential is to protect Oracle and Sun, there is nothing for EU itself that is confidential. So now you know who you should ask to publish the SO!

I’m not an expert on European law, so don’t quote me in an analyst report or anything… But *I’ve been told* that the formal process is pretty simple. The Commission investigates whether a merger could have harmful effects on competition in the market or not. Then they either approve the merger or not, if they don’t, they have to explain (or justify/prove) why, and that is what the SO does.

In practice of course it is not all or nothing. So Oracle has been told long ago – and the SO of course makes it clear too – that out of all of Sun’s products, it is only MySQL that presents anti-trusts problems. The normal thing to do then is for the acquirer to spin off such a business, after which there are no grounds for an SO and the merger can proceed.

But technically such an initiative needs to come from Oracle, formally the Commission doesn’t say anything else than yes or no. In practice Oracle and the EU have had meetings to discuss “what the EC would like Oracle to do” at least since early October. It would of course be silly if Oracle had to guess what the problem is, without getting any hints. So the formal SO is more a result of those talks not succeeding, rather than in itself telling Oracle what it should already have done by now. Again, the SO just presents the evidence why the Commission has to object to the merger, not what Oracle should or shouldn’t do.

The confusing thing, I am told, is trying to work out what the EC would like Oracle to do to appease its concerns. I know that is very straightforward to you but, as you note, the EC isn’t dependent on what you say

Why should we accept your opinion on the contents of this report?
How can we judge the dependency of the contents of the report?

It has not been shared with most of us.

Really? Who in particular is confused? Sadly, I can’t comment on the content as long as the SO isn’t public, but “confusing” is not something I would use to describe it.

Of course, the amount of confusion in this case has surprised me – I’m amazed at how many *legal experts* have a hard time understanding that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are not compatible, just to take a trivial and non-contentious example.

My impression on reading it that as an analysis of the database market it beats any analyst report (on any topic) that I’ve ver seen.

Sorry, forgot you’re an analyst too Well, I was thinking of Gartner etc… But as for 451, you wouldn’t have the same resources to put into creating a report either as the Commission has.

“Statements from MontyWidenius/Florian Mueller objecting to the proposed merger and the European Commission’s Statement of Objections against the merger are *not* the same thing.”

Yes, and it makes me smile when I think about the fact that you need to point this out to people

You could further add that the Commission’s work isn’t dependent on what we have said or didn’t say.

This post was mentioned on Identica by caostheory: New post: Oracle-Sun: Statements and observations. http://bit.ly/5AiRyt...