The US may have cleared Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, but there’s still a view among some people who have been close to this transaction that it won’t be the easy sell in Europe that Wall Street seems to assume.
According to this view, Oracle won’t get the same free pass to acquire Java that it got from the Department of Justice, but will be forced to accept some sort of undertaking to ensure that licensing of Java does not become overly restrictive. Given the central part Java has played in building a counter-weight to Microsoft in the software industry, it isn’t hard to see why European regulators might be interested. There have been rumblings that SAP has been lobbying hard with Brussels on this issue.
If so, then someone forgot to tell Hasso Plattner. The chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, and a co-founder of the company, Plattner was in Silicon Valley late this week, and I got the chance to ask him how he feels about Java passing to Oracle.
His response: “Oracle will not screw it up, they will tread carefully.”
Oracle knows how to accommodate rivals when its own interests are at stake, he reasoned: after all, the fortunes of its database business depend heavily on customers’ ability to run SAP’s applications on top of Oracle software.
But won’t Oracle raise the price of Java licences?
According to Plattner, raising prices would be a sure way to destroy the business. Customers would quickly turn to something cheaper. As we reported at the time of the Oracle/ Sun deal, there is nothing to prevent rivals from forking Java, though they wouldn’t be able to use the name and trademark.
I certainly wouldn’t bet against Brussels holding Oracle’s feet to the fire over the Sun deal. But the lack of concern expressed even by an arch-rival like Plattner suggests that Oracle should eventually prevail without being forced to yield too much on Java.
