After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the last one began to fire many ex-Sun's workers. There are two lead developers of ``GNOME Accessibility'' and ``Orca'' (screen reader for blind people) projects among this big quantity of fired people. One of them have written an open letter to Oracle to review their decision.

Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement.

It’s official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion, without further conditions.

If the deal is approved based on the fact that 'MySQL can be forked', that will be a big blow to open source Software.

Your editor wishes to take no position on whether Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems should be allowed to proceed by the European Union. Such a decision certainly involves a number of antitrust considerations which go beyond the free software community. That said, some of the positions being taken around this acquisition shine an interesting light on how parts of our community work.

Oracle commits to swallowing but not devouring the dolphin, whereas the creator of MySQL database, who is now with Microsoft’s CodePlex Foundation, lobbies with Microsoft against it

In order to appease European regulators, Oracle has made a number of commitments to the future of MySQL. According to a statement overnight (Australian time), Oracle has made a number of public commitments regarding MySQL in order to ease the concerns of European Union regulators investigating the proposed Oracle – Sun merger.