Well, we certainly hope the European Union is not one of them (ask Jonathon and his golden parachute... ;-) ).
It is funny to see how a guy that sold his company by one billion now is trying to prevent the selling of his old toy to Oracle.
Monty, here you have the bad news: you _did_sell_ the company and it was you who took the decision! (I remember how (fake) Jonathon asked (fake) you to bully poor (fake) Marten Mickos to make him accept the selling of the company to us, and how you gladly accepted and even overworked the task...).
It is not that your opinion counts as much as any citizen of the EU, yours count less, as you decided to get rid of the company and now are even a competitor, so it is more probable that you are only trying to undermine a rival using politics instead of fighting in the market. Or maybe you now decide that you made a mistake by selling the company: if you knew Oracle was interested you could have earned a lot more of money...
You wonder why Oracle wants to buy MySQL. I wonder why you care after selling the company, which are your real reasons, Monty? Problems selling your new baby, MariaDB, based on MySQL perhaps? Need free advertising, stopping a competitor, what?
Probably it should be taken into account the opinion of the Sun workers that are loosing their jobs while the EU takes a decision. But it is much more easier to talk about liberties and rights and open-source once you have done the deal of your live and your future is perfectly safe (as mine is, by the way).
And just to discharge Oracle, the latest layoffs at Sun have not been approved or supervised by Oracle, we used our best preferred method, illustrated here:
Some people at Oracle are yelling at us about this method, but until they own the company they cannot change it.Monty, as you say in your own blog: "...a shareholder agreement is that it is terminated when the company is sold". Give it up, let us move on with our lives.
P.S.: An additional note, just in case Monty doesn't know it. Most of the people working in the 'community' developing open-source software are paid by companies like Sun, IBM, HP... huge companies that take profit from the code developed. There are also a lot of people developing new software in the hope that someday their software will pay the bills or they will be bought by a huge company (as MySQL did: first you could live by selling support and _licenses_ as it was a wide spread software and many companies paid for it -as they thought it was worthy to pay for it as they made money by using it: it's what uses to happen in a capitalist world-; then you sold it to Sun for a lot of money).
Sorry Monty, bu only a few programmers do it to keep 'Internet free'. If open-source depended on those lovers of freedom, open-source wouldn't exist as it does today (yeah, even Van Gogh tried to sell his paintings during all his live; he was an artist, but artists also have debts...).
