CNet’s Matt Asay has a pretty provocative post on his blog today, saying that the EU’s decision is a perverse gift to Oracle, like so: the delay will cause more and more customers and employees to flee Sun (a trend that’s already happening), leaving Oracle to declare that, once the merger is approved, its original offer price no longer reflects Sun’s diminished value, causing Sun to either accede to a humiliating reduction in price, or for the deal to flounder altogether (with Oracle swooping in to buy the remnants of the company at fire sale prices when it inevitably collapses completely).A not dissimilar sentiment is expressed by an “expert contributor” over at the Gerson Lehrman Group. The anonymous writer states that the delay was not unexpected, but will still “seriously damage Sun Inc.’s precarious market/financial position and considerably reduce the chances of a successful and profitable merger.” He or she then goes on to claim that the EU’s MySQL concerns are a “red herring” and that they’re really — and “rightly” –concerned about a generally decrease in innovation in a consolidated marketplace.I don’t think there’s any reason not to take the EU’s reasons for delaying the sale at face value — I think it’s totally relevant that MySQL is the most identifiably European of the holdings of either company — and I also wonder to what extent Oracle will view the exodus from Sun as a deal-killer. If you believe, as I do, that Java was the core of the reason Oracle bought Sun, then it’s the rights to the technology that matter above all. If anything, the Java community will benefit from the lack of centralization that such an exodus will cause. And as for the politics of regulation, I do have to agree with a comment from “obutaig” on Matt Asay’s article:Oh for crying out loud! It’s a merger between two large international corporations who both do databases which is close enough that it’s going to require approval in every territory the merger is going to affect. This procedure was always going to happen. Sun know it. Oracle know it. This isn’t a system in which the DoJ does an investigation but the EU can just do what America tells it. This isn’t ‘harming’ the business, it’s part of the business and the price that must be paid to ensure that what happened with all those banks, Worldcom and Enron, all due to not enough oversight, doesn’t happen again. Yes, everyone has to pay the price just so the few criminal companies aren’t overlooked. This is the price of doing business at this scale. Technology Industry