Sun Sets on MySQL Co-Founder Monty Widenius

(MoneyWatch)  Back in October we had the report that MySQL co-founder David Axmark was leaving Sun Microsystems because, according to his resignation letter, "I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them." At the time there were rumors that the other MySQL co-founder, Monty Widenius, was considering leaving. Now it's official.

In this case, the rumors had some elements of truth to them. I had told management that I thus would be submitting my resignation immediately as I strongly believed that the 5.1 release was not ready and that those problems needed to be fixed before it went GA. This action, together with other peoples?´ efforts, did have the wanted effect and I made an agreement with Sun?´s upper management to not initiate my resignation but instead stay around for three more months to help Sun work out things in MySQL Development and also give Sun a chance to create an optimal role for me within Sun.

Three months became seven, Sun didn't make the changes he wanted as fast as he wanted them, including making the MySQL server "a true open development environment."

And so Widenius has started a new company that will work on developing the Maria project: a storage engine that is supposed to be an improvement on MySQL's MyISAM engine, including crash recovery features. Oh, boy, does this mean that MySQL can compete with ... MySQL?

One shouldn't regard the MySQL-Maria tree as a fork but as a branch as we intend to pull in all changes from the official tree to the MySQL-Maria tree; Some of the changes will probably be reworked but we will do our best to ensure that for the end user they should look and feel the same.

I'll take that as a yes.

(Via Slashdot)