New CEOs for Funambol and Openbravo. Funding for 10gen. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Funambol appointed Amit Chawla as its new CEO.

# Openbravo appointed Paolo Juvara as its new CEO and raised a new funding round.

# 10gen raised $6.5m in third-round funding led by Sequoia Capital.

# Microsoft has reportedly invested an undisclosed sum in TurboHercules.

# …

EC approves Oracle-Sun. Google patents MapReduce. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

EC approves Oracle-Sun
The European Commission cleared Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. While Larry Ellison is set to unveil Oracle’s Sun strategy on January 27th, Monty Widenius said he will go to the Court of First Instance to appeal the decision.

# Pro-open source political party formed in Hungary.

# Google …

A recent pitch from the folks opposing Oracle’s ownership of MySQL via acquisition of Sun Microsystems got me thinking. The plea, ‘Oracle can have Sun, but not MySQL’ may make sense to some, but to me it speaks to the irony of closing out Oracle or any company or anyone from open source. Upon further reflection and given 2010 is off to a roaring pace of M&A, I also began to wonder what the impact of the ‘Save MySQL’ campaign could be on open source in M&A, particularly if it was to successfully derail the acquisition or somehow decouple MySQL from Sun under Oracle?

What would it mean to carve out the open source projects, components, teams and support from companies involved in mergers and acquisitions over …

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections.

…

Topics for this podcast:

*2009 review and 2010 preview
*New CAOS survey and report – Climate Change
*Ups and downs in new round of GPL lawsuits
*Oracle-Sun-MySQL saga continues

iTunes or direct download (30:00, 6.9 MB)

Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems looks set for approval by the European Commission after the competition commission welcomed commitments from Oracle related to the future development and licensing of the open source MySQL database.

The EC has until January 27, 2010, to reach a final decision however it appears that significant progress has been made following hearings in Brussels last week where Oracle made its case for approving the acquisition and opponents including SAP, Microsoft and Monty Program AB argued against the proposed acquisition.

Oracle has published a list of ten commitments that it is prepared to make to assuage the EC’s concerns over the future of MySQL, which were quickly and enthusiastically welcomed by the European Commission.

Oracle’s commitments …

I got a call from Monty today, and he told me that its crunch-time: the European Commission is about to come up with a decision on the status of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems. The part that interested me verbally, and he wrote (you should read: Monty says: Help saving MySQL), was this:

Instead of just working out this with the EC and agree on appropriate remedies to correct the situation, Oracle has instead contacted hundreds of their big customers and asked them to write to the EC and require unconditional acceptance of the deal.

Monty has a simple …

Topics for this podcast:

*As the Oracle-Sun-MySQL EC world turns
*Google gets its Web on with Go and Chrome
*Open source and cloud computing complement, compete
*How transparent is your open core?

iTunes or direct download (26:20, 6.0 MB)

I’ve been trying to dig a bit deeper into the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems, to look beyond the received wisdom about the EC’s concerns about the deal.

We know they revolve around the open source MySQL database, the European Commission has said that much. But the Statement of Objections weighs in at 155 pages, and even those that have read it admit to being confused by it. Meanwhile some of the most vocal parties in the public debate have vested interests in encouraging opinions for or against the deal.

Without knowing precisely what the European Commission wants to achieve it is impossible to come to any conclusions about the investigation. However, here are a few statements and observations:

…

Since the European Commission announced it was opening an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle with a focus on MySQL there has been no shortage of opinion written about Oracle’s impending ownership of MySQL and its impact on MySQL users and commercial partners, as well as MySQL’s business model, dual licensing and the GPL.

In order to try and bring some order to the conversation, we have brought together some of the most referenced blog posts and news stories in chronological order.

Part one took us from the announcement of the EC’s in-depth investigation up to the eve of the communication of the EC’s Statement of Objections.

Part two, below, takes us from there to the eve of the announcement of Oracle’s concessions. …