I think that most people are missing the point, Oracle included. The main objection of the EU is not that Oracle is swallowing up a major competitor.
To understand this you have to read between the lines of the EU decision:
"The regulators see a major conflict of interest in the world's largest commercial database company owning its largest open-source competitor"
This should actually read: "the world's largest commercial database company owning the largest open-source database"
The database market is divided into 2 parts: the back-office and the online world.
And now you know what I am going to say ... Oracle has an near monopoly in back-office and MySQL has a monopoly in online applications.
So let's do a little maths:
If we assume that back-office and online applications divide the database market into 2 equal parts, and that Oracle owns 60% of the back-office, and MySQL 90% of the online world.
This means that Oracle controls 30% (60% of 50%) of the entire database market today, but after the acquisition this number will be 75% (30% + 90% of 50%).
Something to think about.
