NOUVELLES

DEC

Helpmysql.org campaign delivers first 14.000 signatures to competition authorities

Brussels, Belgium, 04 January 2010 -- Oracle's takeover of Sun encounters massive resistance on the Internet, three weeks after Oracle claimed to be close to obtaining approval by the European Commission and other regulators. The www.helpmysql.org campaign, launched by MySQL's creator and founder, Michael 'Monty' Widenius, today presented 14,000 signatures for a worldwide petition against the deal in its present form. More than 5,000 signatures are from self-employed developers and more than 3,000 from employees of companies and organizations of all sizes using MySQL.

The initial batch of signatures was delivered to the European Commission and other European institutions, including the European Parliament and the competition authorities of the 27 EU Member States, as well as to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). It has also been offered to the Swiss Wettbewerbskommission (Weko). According to the organizers of the campaign, subsequent deliveries of new signatures will now take place once or twice a week, and at a later point the petition will also be given to competition authorities in more countries, in particular Japan and Brasil.

The petition form is located at http://www.helpmysql.org/en/petition and the number of signatures can be watched at http://www.helpmysql.org/en/stats (update every approximately ten minutes).

"In less than one week, during the Holiday Season, we gathered 50 times more support than Oracle claimed three weeks ago when it presented a few hundred orchestrated letters from customers to the European Commission", said Widenius. "It seems the customers supporting Oracle were only concerned about Sun's other business while our supporters show they care about MySQL. Our signatories don't have faith that Oracle could be a good steward of MySQL and they don't buy Oracle's empty promises at all", he continued.

The campaign vows to "keep gathering support until the very end of the process", highlighting that the transaction has still not been cleared by several major jurisdictions.

Florian Mueller, who cooperates closely with Widenius on this matter and has previously gathered massive support from the open source movement in connection with an EU decision (on software patents), is convinced of rapidly growing support: "The campaign has only started and the number of signatures will double very quickly now that people return to work after the holidays."

The petition text asks "competition authorities around the world to block Oracle's acquisition of Sun" unless one of the solutions that the signatories of the petition can select is put in place. Those possibilities include a divestiture of MySQL to a suitable third party, a so-called "linking exception", and releasing MySQL (all past versions and the ones released over the next three years) under the Apache Software License 2.0, an open source license.

The petition states that Oracle's recent MySQL-related promises "can at best have a transitional effect (if any) but cannot ensure true innovation related to MySQL and safeguard MySQL as a major competitive force." The petition expresses the belief that "Oracle, if it acquired Sun's MySQL, would a fundamental conflict of interests between MySQL (and its different editions and storage engines) on the one hand and Oracle's high-priced products on the other hand." The text also highlights "the fundamental importance of databases to the knowledge-based economy".

The campaign is now available in the following 20 languages (in alphabetical order): Chinese, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. It has a Facebook group named "Save MySQL from Oracle" with presently more than 1,600 members and can be followed on Twitter (http://twitter.com/helpmysql).

About Michael 'Monty' Widenius and Monty Program Ab

Michael 'Monty' Widenius is the creator of MySQL, the world's most popular open source database. In 2001, he founded the namesake company that was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008 for a total consideration of approximately US$1 billion. The European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EVCA) named this transaction the "European Venture Capital Deal of the Year 2008". On a previous occasion, Widenius had been named the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year 2003.

In 2009, Widenius left Sun and created a new company, Monty Program Ab, based in Tuusula (Helsinki area), Finland. Monty Program Ab develops MariaDB and the Maria database storage engine and other MySQL-related technologies. The company is a founding member of the Open Database Alliance.

Monty Program Ab corporate website: http://askmonty.org

Michael Widenius' blog: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/

About Florian Mueller

Florian Mueller is a software industry veteran with 24 years of experience as well as an award-winning EU policy strategist. Previously founder and CEO of a startup he sold to the Telefónica group, Mueller became in 2001 an adviser to MySQL's then-CEO on corporate strategy and held shares in the company until its sale.

The Economist Group's European Voice named Mueller the EU Campaigner of the Year 2005. Mueller was also named to thought leader rankings in intellectual property as well as information technology. He has also successfully worked on EU competition matters in connection with professional soccer.