Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and former Motorola CEO and Sun Microsystems executive Ed Zander appeared together on stage last night at an event organized by the Churchill Club.

TechPulse360 reported that Larry Ellison said he would not spin-off MySQL despite possible objections by European regulators looking into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, which owned MySQL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cya5Tnv92p4&feature=player_embedded

Mr Ellison also said that Sun is losing about $100m a month and he would like to complete the acquisition, which has been held up because of a review by the European Commission.

"Sun is losing $100 million a month, we'd like to get this thing done," said Ellison. He said he thought the EC would okay the deal and that he would not consider spinning off mySQL even if the EC made it a condition of approval. In any case, he doesn't think there should be an issue because the open source database is in a completely different market than Oracle. "mySQL and Oracle do not compete at all. If you look at where we compete it's with DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Sybase and a long list of others. We never compete against mySQL, it addresses very different markets."

Ellison: 'Sun losing $100 million a month' - InternetNews

Earlier in the evening, Ed Zander questioned Mr Ellison's acquisition of Sun saying: "What could you possibly be thinking."

Mr Ellison said that Oracle wants to compete with IBM

Oracle, he said, does not wish to compete with the likes of Dell. "We have a deep interest in the systems business," delivering hardware and software combinations that can be the backbone of most enterprises in America and the world, Ellison said.
"We're very interested in running airline reservation systems and we're very interested in running banking systems andtelecommunications systems and that require both hardware and software," said Ellison. IBM is the company Oracle wants to compete with, he said.
He pledged to keep the multitude of Sun technologies that Oracle would acquire, including x86 technology, Sparc processors, tape, and storage. Ellison also lauded Java and the Solaris Unix OS. "The Java [platform] already is the lingua franca of network computers," Ellison said.

Ellison: We won't spin off MySQL by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech