Waiting Game for Sun Micro

The worker bees at Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) are biting their nails. As one Sun employee told me Tuesday, the EU's deadline to approve Oracle Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ORCL) $7.4 billion bid for the server maker is Thursday. Assuming the deal gets approval, "all hell breaks loose" as Oracle moves to quickly close the deal and employees learn who has a post-merger job and who doesn't, the Sun source said.

It might not happen that fast, however. A Reuters report Tuesday afternoon, citing unnamed sources, said the European antitrust authority could delay approval over concerns about Oracle taking over MySQL, Sun's open source database management software. Combining this with Oracle's own leading position in database offerings apparently, if Reuters' sources are right, is giving the EU heartburn.

This could feasibly delay the closing of the deal, which was approved by the Justice Department last week, for as long as four months. Or perhaps it would give Oracle a valid excuse to get rid of MySQL, which was acquired by Sun last year for $1 billion and ostensibly doesn't rank high on the list of reasons why Oracle acquired Sun in the first place. -- Olaf de Senerpont Domis