He said he was going to do it and he has.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius has made good his quixotic threat to appeal the European Commission's decision to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun - and with it MySQL, which Sun paid a downright silly billion dollars for two years ago. Oracle closed on Sun in January and Widenius had a few months grace to take his case to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg.

It is unclear what he hopes to accomplish since he has basically gone underground and turned off his phone while the futility of the move has already cost him his chief spokesman Florian Mueller.

Apparently Monty's waiting for Oracle to respond to the suit. Presumably he's hoping that the software giant will tighten up on the 10 loose and non-illegally binding undertakings it gave the EC last year to keep MySQL competitive so it could blast through the logjam that Monty helped create that held up the $7.4 billion acquisition for months at the cost of millions of dollars.

Widenius says they're not "worth the paper they were written on" although MySQL seems to have survived six months with Oracle and there is now a new MySQL support organization created by ex-MySQL people called SkySQL.

The EC, which did not yet know the grounds for Monty's suit, told the Financial Times it intends to defend its position.

Monty told the paper he was using his own money to pursue his quest. No doubt the lawyers will appreciate his effort.

Widenius, evidently hoping lightening strikes twice, is currently developing MariaDB, a backward-compatible, drop-in replacement of the MySQL Database Serve that includes all the major open source storage engines. Like MySQL it's available under the GPL 2 license.