MariaDB never should have happened. Monty Widenius, the founder of both MySQL and MariaDB, made a bundle selling MySQL to Oracle years ago, but he then launched MariaDB to try to return the heart of MySQL to a proprietary-free open source(only to later add in his own proprietary bits to MariaDB). It has made for great theater but, somehow, it has also made for a very popular database.
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(Insider Story)