US Gov't Lobbied EU To Approve Oracle-Sun Merger 169
littlekorea writes "Cables leaked by Wikileaks have revealed that the U.S. Government actively pressured the EU Competition Commissioner to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The cable reveals that the U.S. went to great lengths to discover how the competition commissioner felt about the 'pro-competitive' nature of open source software and whether this would represent a threat to the US$7.4 billion deal."
Re:It's only right! (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't know how true that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTRON [wikipedia.org]
From the link: "The Japanese government planned to introduce the Matsushita PC in its schools, but the United States government objected, claiming that the plan constituted market intervention and threatened Japan with sanctions (partly at the request of Microsoft)."
I've seen a BTRON machine and it was impressive, easily better than Windows of the era. It should be noted that BTRON was an open OS and was developed by a group of companies who had a mutually vested interest. It lives on however as iTRON, which is the OS in things like car control systems, washing machine fuzzy logic controllers, refrigerators, TV's, cell phones etc. Next time you pop open something and find a chip with "Renesas" printed on it you can probably assume it's got iTRON on it.