Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) on Thursday said the U.S. Department of Justice has approved its US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), although the deal is subject to certain conditions and still needs the blessing of European regulators.
Oracle first announced its bid in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16.
The combined company will give Oracle an array of new assets, including a stake in the computer hardware market, the open-source MySQL database and stewardship of the Java programming language.
Sun would be just the latest in a long string of companies gobbled up in recent years by Oracle.
But the pending deal for Sun has attracted a particularly large amount of scrutiny, including worries from open-source advocates about the fate of technologies like MySQL and the Solaris operating system under Oracle, and antitrust reviews from the DOJ and European Commission.
In June, the DOJ extended its review of the merger, to address questions over the way Java is licensed. Meanwhile, the European Commission has said it would issue an initial opinion on the deal in September.
