MySQL's good-looking and now rich former CEO Marten Mickos asked the European Commission Thursday to rubberstamp Oracle's acquisition of Sun, which is supposedly held up by EC concerns over MySQL's destiny at the hands of Oracle.

Mickos said in a letter to EC antitrust czarina Neelie Kroes that further delay and uncertainty will blunt MySQL's competition edge, not to mention Sun's.

He claims Oracle won't damage MySQL and anyway it can't 'cause MySQL is open source and "can't be controlled by a single entity - not even the owner of the MySQL assets" and he argues that "if...it becomes difficult or impossible for large companies to acquire open source assets, then venture investments in open source companies will slow down, harming the evolution of and innovation in open source, which would result in decreased competition."

Oracle reportedly thinks IBM is really the gray eminence behind the delay.

Marten has just become entrepreneur-in-residence at MySQL's old backer Benchmark Capital.

He supposedly wrote Neelie on behalf of MySQL people still at Sun and says he has no lingering "commercial or financial interests in the MySQL ecosystem, Sun or Oracle (or any other vendor in the DBMS market for that matter)."

He argues that Oracle can only control MySQL's licensing, but not its user base, largely free (12 million strong), independent of commercial support and interested only in bug fixes and ongoing development; they can use a fork, if needs be.

Even commercial accounts (a few thousand) don't necessarily have a subscription and can function without MySQL support. They too could shift to a fork and get support elsewhere as one of them, a reportedly big account, already has because of Oracle.

The smallest MySQL contingent (a few hundred) commercial licensees would be dependent on Oracle but can switch to another embedded database or open source their own product and comply with the GPL.