Owwwwwwwie, this has GOTTA hurt. ;-7
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union’s antitrust chief said Tuesday that U.S. senators who pressed her to approve Oracle Corp.’s takeover of Sun Microsystems Inc. should stop interfering in Europe’s affairs and prioritize U.S. health care reform.
Neelie Kroes, EU competition commissioner, is holding up the $7.4 billion deal over worries that it would give Oracle too much control over the database software market.
A group of 59 U.S. senators wrote to her last month, asking her to speed up approval for a deal that, if it fails, could cost thousands of American jobs.
Kroes slammed the senators for “interfering in someone else’s decisions rather than taking the most important decision that you have control over: improving health care.”
“Is this really more important than fixing your own health care system?” she asked in a speech, adding that the senators needed to get their priorities straight.
Oh, and she’s not just right about that.
European regulators have a Jan. 27 deadline to decide whether to approve the takeover or block it. They say they are concerned that Oracle will gain control of open source database company MySQL, which they claim will increasingly pose a threat to Oracle’s own proprietary database software.
The EU commission says it is concerned that Oracle could refuse to license MySQL to some companies or for some uses in order to favor its own software – which could limit customer choice and ultimately hike prices. Sun paid $1 billion for MySQL last year.
That’s right, geeks and geekettes and little geeklings. MySQL, one of the most powerful pieces of open source software out there, software upon which literally hundreds of thousands of websites and small businesses depend, could GO AWAY FOREVER out of this deal.
But the 59 corporate sellouts who claim to be worried about “thousands of jobs” haven’t worried about THAT, have they?
And what stands between those small businesses and this latest threatened rape of the middle class by corporate America? Not our own “democratic” (*coughBULLSHIT!cough*) government. Certainly not the corporations themselves.
A handful of folks in Europe are the ones who have to do this corporate trust-busting dirty laundry for us. AGAIN. AGAIN!
Nice, eh?
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Got work coming in, and it’s not all just chopping pumpkins. Those who care, thanks. I’ll be around. Those who don’t, yeah, whatever, you know what two words I have for the likes of you.
The one thing that would help Americans the most, health care reform and regulation, and these guys are worried about their corporate owners. 59 Senators.. I’d love to see the names and the letter