Well, as predicted, the European Commission has chosen to invoke its right to study the Oracle-Sun deal, with the fate of MySQL being the reason explicitly cited as the origin of the hold-up. Java watchers will have to stew for a few more months of limbo over a non-Java-related issue arising from an acquisition by Sun last year that may or may not have been a good idea at the time.I’m actually not by any means ideologically opposed to government scrutiny of corporate mergers, but following the Sun-Oracle drama does offer me a window into why companies find the delays so infuriating. (To my mind, the solution is to provide more resources to government anti-trust divisions, not to cut back on oversight.) The biggest problem is generally the inability of companies to discuss concrete post-merger plans; if the post-announcement pre-deal-closing period stretches for weeks or month, crazed speculation enters the vacuum. Sun blogger Joerg Moellenkamp offered a particularly hilarious example of this. Oracle used “hp” as the directory name for Webpages describing Sun hardware and Oracle software together will be speedy, with the hp almost certainly standing for “high performance.” But when those two letters were spotted in the page’s URL, a flurry of speculation was unleashed that Sun’s hardware division was on the verge of being sold to Hewlett-Packard. It’s ridiculous, but it’s just the sort of thing that will keep happening until the deal is closed. Technology Industry