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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if some distro repos will stop installing mariadb instead of mysql whenever you try to install mysql. Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development. (MariaDB.org seems to be still active, but there is now much more uncertainty (imo) compared to the mysql project)

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At a glance, it seems like the open source MariaDB is just fine. It's the commercial company that is dead/dying. This may affect future development on the OSS side, but for now it seems like there's no immediate danger.

As for why it's included over MySQL, it's undoubtedly the fact that MySQL has been owned by Oracle since 2010. Oracle has not been the most friendly to OSS communities in the past.

You were probably talking only about the OSS side of that particular RDBMS, but I believe that effect on OSS in general might actually be even more interesting: taking a few years of salaries from investors and then pack up when tensions over postponing profitability reach uncomfortable levels? At some point capital will start refusing to play that game.

This is supposed to be about "racism, sexism" and stuff like that, but I don't necessarily see any contradiction. Because it's not unheard of that in troubled companies, questionable people rise to or stay in power that would not stand a chance in a more healthy environment where better candidates don't run away. Selection for the kind of person who'd rather be captain on a sinking wreck than some lower officer on a well run boat and I'd be surprised if there wasn't considerable correlation between those and the scandal that's supposedly the root cause here.

It's literally "lesser evil", as MySQL is owned by Oracle now.

> Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

It never stopped, but it did seem to stagnate a fair bit for a while meaning that MariaDB trumped it on some features & fixes. For instance CTE support arrived in stable releases about a year earlier. That of course may not be the case any more.

Oracle seems to do large feature drops every few years, while MariaDB has been shipping features incrementally every 6 months or so. The first couple of versions were the exception: they pulled an enormous amount of functionality from other forks, many of which have since been removed (things like the TokuDB storage engine). Left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth (how can you depend on a database that shoves 50 features in, and then removes 20 of them during the next few years).

We have low visibility into MySQL development process (is the bug tracker still closed? I am not sure), so when they shipped 8.0 in 2018 it was quite a surprise. They fixed a number of outstanding issues, including many extremely bad defaults (like using proper Unicode by default). Some things added in 8.0 (like atomic DDL) are still not available in MariaDB. Oracle being Oracle, there haven't been any major releases since.

as a database engines fan, I am glad for mariadb to have been the replacement in many distros. This way it got traction and mariadb did interesting things the last few years. Oracle mysql put out interesting releases with v8 again too. While I got hit by some bugs in mariadb, I did also benefit. As long as core developers aren't stranded or go outside sql/databases I don't think there is a technical loss.

> Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

It makes sense if the distribution no longer includes mysql, and the mysql the distribution included previously was from before the fork: users who already had mysql installed would be automatically migrated to a compatible replacement. It's the same thing which happened with openoffice and libreoffice.

> Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

What actually happened is more like they changed their name, and sold the old name to Oracle. Oracle then forked and carried on developing a new product under the old name, while the original team carried on developing the old product under the new name (mariadb).

That is why distros did what they did.

MySQL sold to Sun in 2008, which was then gobbled up by Oracle in 2009.

MariaDB is the fork, technically speaking. The distro switch took some time, probably in part because they wanted to wait and see if MariaDB would be suitable / sustainable.

Fedora and openSUSE switched to MariaDB in 2013, in part due to Oracle's license changes and changes to info published in CVEs and because they were considered easier to work with. (See: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/201...)

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