Open Database Alliance created for MySQL

[waf]

http://www.h-online.com/open/Open-Database-Alliance-created-for-MySQL--/news/113283

The Open Database Alliance (ODA) has been launched. The consortium, founded by Monty Program AB, the company created by MySQL founder Monty Widenius, and MySQL specialists Percona, has been created as a focal point for all companies, organisations and individuals with an interest in MySQL and the future development of the open source database. According to the announcement, the ODA will be comprised of companies involved in providing software, support and services for MariaDB, Monty Program's fork of MySQL.

The ODA intends to unify all MySQL related activity as a counter to "the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL"; a reference to the acquisition of MySQL owner Sun by database giant Oracle and the worries Widenius and others have over Oracle's plans for the MySQL database.

According to Widenius the Open Database Alliance has been created as a "thin umbrella". After leaving Sun Widenius wanted to create a smaller company to develop the database and plug-in to a community of MySQL developers and suppliers.

[waf]

http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB

MariaDB is a community developed branch of the MySQL database that uses the Maria engine by default.

We can't use the MySQL name as this is trademarked by Sun, and Sun has chosen to keep that trademark quite exclusive to itself. The name MySQL (just like the MyISAM storage engine) comes from Monty's first daughter "My". MariaDB continues this tradition by being named after his younger daughter.

To provide a community developed, stable, and always Free branch of MySQL that is, on the user level, compatible with the main version. We strive for total interoperability with our upstreams and our own community.

MariaDB will be kept up to date with the latest MySQL release from the same branch. For example MariaDB 5.1 will be kept up to date with MySQL 5.1.

We will do a merge from the MySQL branch for every new MySQL release or when there is some fatal bugfix applied to the main branch.

We strive to keep our main trees as free from bugs as possible. It should be reasonably safe to pull from our trees at any time. We work to provide builds of the main branch and active development branches every month.

MariaDB is available under the terms of the GPL v2 license, just like MySQL.

The MariaDB project is the brainchild of Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL and Monty Program Ab.