Oracle and content farming don’t have anything to do with one another (or do they), but they do seem to be topics that are dominating the news in my little corner of the world today.

The last obstacle to Oracle’s takeover of Sun (and MySQL, its subsidiary) is the European Commission, which is investigating the antitrust implications of the merger. Last week, hearings started. Everyone sees this as their last chance to make themselves heard on the topic, and the stakes are high.

MySQL creator Monty Widenius has posted an impassioned plea for people to contact the EC opposing the deal for fear that Oracle will find crippling or killing MySQL to be more lucrative than supporting it robustly. He also says that Oracle has asked its customers to contact the EC and demand that the deal go through, so he’s asking MySQL users to contact the EC on behalf of an independent MySQL. For more, see Paul McCullagh and Jeremy Zawodny. Oracle has also posted its list of guarantees to reassure the MySQL community.

I think that the Oracle-Sun deal will go through and that MySQL will fall into the hands of Oracle, and I’m worried about the future of the product. Ultimately, though, I think that MySQL has gotten too big and pervasive for Oracle to be able to kill it off.

Today everybody’s talking about content farming. Tim Bray talks about search engines losing their grip, and Scott Rosenberg argues against describing SEO-driven content as fast food. Jacob’s comment on my previous post is definitely worth reading as well. Oh, and Chris Dixon makes the point that the subjects that are most heavily gamed also happen to be those that get the least attention on human networks.

Now I’m all caught up.