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MySQL Founder Starts Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring
Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.
It was during MySQL AB's time that MySQL began a stange play with the community by first dropping official community binary builds, and then severely delaying source code releases as well (while supplying commercial clients with more stable and up to date releases).
It was again during MySQL AB's time when the announcement came that MySQL's source code base will start to "close down", by releasing many new features only commercially, and with no open source code. When Sun bought MySQL AB, they reversed those policies and stood behind MySQL being open, without exceptions.
Now Mr. Monty Widenius has taken the money Sun paid for MySQL AB, and used it to open a new company and an "Open" alliance which is "designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other".
If even Mr. Widenius has noble intentions regarding MySQL, his past in MySQL AB and his current interaction with Sun/Oracle seem to leave another impression.