What if Oracle's buyout of Sun falls through?

Come on EU make a decision already one way or the other. This is bull****.

EU is a Bureaucracy (not a Democracy). What did you expect?

I expected them to make a decision in less than twice the time it took America to make one. I understand that there's more interests at play there but come on, If you are not going to ban the merger say so don't beat around the bush. If you are going to allow it allow it.

When the US Senate, a group famous for filibusters, asks you to speed things up a bit you really ought to listen because it means you're too slow.

P.S. I apologize if this is a TOS violation

@chalbersma: Your post seemed narrowly on topic to me so I doubt anyone will object to it.

Oh, and BTW, you're right. It doesn't matter what side of the merger debate you're on or what your political views are. Dithering doesn't serve anyone's interests. Resolution, one way or another, is important for all parties involved.

Dithering could have served everybody well in the Office Open XML affair. That never should have been "fast-tracked"; it was a transparent abuse of the system.

Hoo boy, am I gonna get flamed for this one?

The only quick answer you get from a bureaucrat is no. If you want a yes, be prepared to wait.

@gus3: I don't think you'll get flamed. I think you'll get a lot of people agreeing with you.

If anyone is interested, there is an excellent discussion on what "bureaucracy" means and how it works, here:

Online http://mises.org/etexts/mises/bureaucracy.asp

or PDF http://mises.org/etexts/bureaucracy.pdf

It certainly would be nice if the EU would "get off their tails", as it were, regardless of my opinion of the EU bureaucrats taking such a decision upon themselves rather than leaving it to Sun/Oracle stockholders.

Oh no! Not mises.org again!

Quoting:It certainly would be nice if the EU would "get off their tails"

They will, if Oracle retracts from the European market (or doesn't buy MySQL). It's that simple. Doing business somewhere means dealing with the bureaucracy somewhere.

BTW this 'delay' taking so long is caused by too less employers at the DG in Brussels, not (only) because of bureaucracy. You see, when something takes long, we here in Europe like to blame the bureaucracy and we insist on less civil servants, wrongfully believing this will decrease bureaucracy. However, it just takes longer to follow the same procedures now, the citizens think bureaucracy increased and insist on more civil servants at EU-headquarters "somewhere south of NL" (because it's unclear where 'headquarters' is, ahem) being fired and so on. Speaking relatively, there are less civil servants per 100.000 inhabitants than in a municipality like Rotterdam I believe.

And when it comes to competition, it's not bureaucracy that's the problem, but a lack of clear unambiguous laws which don't require "interpreting them in court". That's the biggest problem of the EU, those half baked vague compromises leading to laws open for different interpretation. Just because the members disagree, as always.

> However, it just takes longer to follow the same procedures now,

...because although the number of bureaucrats has been decreased, the policies were never retracted so the same things still "have" to be done.

> And when it comes to competition, it's not bureaucracy that's the problem, but a lack of clear unambiguous laws which don't require "interpreting them in court".

Couldn't agree more.

> That's the biggest problem of the EU, those half baked vague compromises leading to laws open for different interpretation. Just because the members disagree, as always.

One of the serious downsides of "statute" law. Either it's written so broadly that the judges have to make it up as they go along, or it's written so specifically that lawyers and other imaginative people can dance around it. Either way, no one is happy and the problem the law was supposed to address ends up not being solved anyway.

I certainly hope that the stockholders/management of these companies can still make a go of it, merged or not, by the time they find out what the lay of the playing field is to be.