So, Who Owns Maria Now?

Last Friday’s news of Monty officially resigning was important news, though not really earth shattering. The news of Martin leaving was actually bigger to me, since I didn’t see it coming, and the exit strategy seem less clear for him. That said, I think that the general discussion on these events are just rehashes of the same arguments that come up whenever the next big drama hits in the mysql world. It happened when they sued NuSphere, happened when they GPL’d their libraries, happened when PHP removed the MySQL libraries, happened when they split the development tree, happened when Sun bought them out, happened when Axmark left, happened when they released 5.1, happened when they released 5.0, happened when they talked about proprietary only features, happened when they forked drizzle, happened when Oracle bought InnoDB, and maybe even a little when Oracle bought BerklyDB :-D. Drama Drama Drama! Every time, people claim the next “drama” is what will help MySQL get to the next level; other people claim this will be the downfall. Some people who were going to switch to MySQL don’t. Some people who are using MySQL switch to Postgres. And yet, the new users keep coming, and the machine rolls on. And so I think it will be with these changes. MySQL is like Windows now; it can afford to stumble, it can even afford to do harm to it’s users; it doesn’t matter. It has reached a level of ubiquity that means it will be around for quite some time. That is not going to change, and that is not what this post is about. So, having wasted a paragraph on that topic, what is this post about? Mostly I am wondering if someone can answer the question of “who owns Maria now?”. Monty said that he plans to start his own company that will do custom development and also continue developing the Maria table egine. But it seems odd that he would do this if that code is still owned by Sun, since they would control the release cycle, have final say on all patches, and also require some kind of proprietary licensing rights to keep it in the main product. And I want to know if it will be in the main product. I like several of the ideas in Maria, but right now there is no way to get it in a format that I would run on my customers production machines. That’s fine, it is still under development, I shouldn’t run it in production now anyways. But what is that ultimate path that gets it into my servers going to be? Drizzle is not ready, and I don’t think it’s end game involves Maria (though I think it would be a better fit overall). The OurDelta builds are not quite there yet either, though this might just be a product of my own comfort level rather than the code itself. As much as I don’t trust Sun/MySQL code, I know there is a good user base to turn to for FLOSS level support, and I don’t think OurDelta has that yet. Also I don’t have Baron on IM, so no free advice from him ;-). I think if Sun owns Maria, it means that Maria development will stagnate, with Monty being unhappy working within those confines. OTOH, if Monty Program AB owns it, then I see issues with it being accepted by large numbers (much like SolidDB never was) in the Sun/MySQL ecosystem, but probably more chance for adoption within OurDelta; meaning I should start paying more attention to OurDelta. So, does anyone know the answer?