I had the benefit of seeing Monty talk at All Your Base conference in Oxford last year, and let me tell you, he made it quite clear that a huge driving force behind MariaDB is to take on Oracle, because he absolutely hates them for what they've done with MySQL. Remember, the original sale of MySQL wasn't to Oracle, it was to Sun, which was then acquired by Oracle. After hearing what he had to say, I have nothing but a tremendous amount of respect for Monty, and wish him all the success in the world.

Except, as much I am not a fan of the company, Oracle has done a far better job managing and improving MySQL than Sun so far.

Having the same company own both the main engine (InnoDB) and the harness (MySQL) has been tremendously valuable.

> he absolutely hates them for what they've done with MySQL

I may be a bit ignorant, but what have they done with MySQL?

You can watch the video of his talk here. http://vimeo.com/56639635

Perhaps "hate" is the wrong word, and it should be more "dislike", since Oracle are essentially the complete opposite of what Monty wants to encourage (e.g. Hacker Business Model, Open Source). My memory's a bit hazy, but from what I gathered, Oracle tried to stop MySQL in its early days by acquiring the INNODB Engine around 2005. After that, once Oracle acquired Sun and thus MySQL, Monty and many of the other original developers saw Oracle as being against the spirit of the original intention of MySQL, shifting away from the principles they wanted to encourage, particularly open source philosophies, and they wanted to make sure a version of MySQL would always stay free. From what I recall, he believed that Oracle were no longer fixing known bugs because they didn't know how, and they were also moving from "open source" to "open core", where new features were closed source.

I really hate the word hate. This has the whole stupid jenkins/hudson thing written all over it.

I do appreciate Monty's efforts, but really, can we kiss and make up? And if oracle wants to monetize MySql, so what? The rest of us get a better database.

Previous release of MySQL new version was really evolutionary, so I'm sure now that Oracle can improve this DB. And if we will add some facts about InnoDB then all Monty's "hate" will look like populism or try to keep the face.

...after he made wheelbarrows full of money from the Sun purchase.

MariaDB basically exists because of Monty's hatred for Oracle (which bought Sun after Sun bought MySQL for wheelbarrows full of money from Monty). It won't happen.

If it was me, I'd keep cranking out superior databases, selling them for a billion, and starting on the next one as fast as they'd buy em :)

I think it would be a bit premature to call MariaDB superior to MySQL.

Also it should be noted that the InnoDB storage engine was developed outside of MySQL AB. InnoDB is a helluva lot better than MyISAM for most applications because of performance and support for transactions, consistency, etc. Without it I don't think that MySQL would be a good candidate for many applications, particularly given that Postgres has improved a lot. I.e. I'm not sure Monty should really get credit for everything about MySQL/MariaDB.

I think that's what Stonebreaker did with PostgreSQL, VoltDB, Vertica...

Not sure if intentional, but Stonebreaker is an awesome misspelling of Stonebraker.

Yes, I misspelled Stonebraker, thanks for the correction.

Monty started MariaDB pretty much as soon as he left Sun, long before the Oracle acquisition, but shortly after he started criticizing the release of mysql 5.1 under Sun, which was widely regarded as botched.

It would be an interesting move from Oracle to even try. Nothing would say corporate desperation as much as trying to buy the project that sprung out when you first bought the project.

That said, I wouldn't put it beneath them...

It does not make sense for Oracle to try that. MariaDB demonstrates there is enough support to sustain a DB that is MySQL but without Oracle. They'd have to be dumb not to expect another MariaDB to spring up after the hypothetical takeover.

Not that the takeover is feasible, as the other answers point out.