EU reveals probe into Oracle's bid

Business software giant Oracle's 7.4-billion-dollar bid for Sun Microsystems is under investigation under EU merger regulations, the European Commission announced on Thursday.

Brussels "has to examine very carefully the effects on competition in Europe when the world's leading proprietary database company proposes to take over the world's leading open source database company," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

The deal for Sun, a one-time Silicon Valley star and the developer of the popular Java programming language, was approved by Sun shareholder in July and the US Department of Justice in August, but is now on hold until the EU reports again in late-January.

The takeover in terms of euros is worth 5.17 billion euros.

(c) 2009 AFP