The founder of MySQL Michael Widenius "Monty" claims that Oracle is killing off his MySQL database and he is recommending that people move to his new project MariaDB. In an interview with Muktware Widenius said his MariaDB, which is also open source, its on track to replacing MySQL at WikiMedia and other major organizations and companies.

He said MySQL was widely popular long before MySQL was bought by Sun because it was free and had good support. There was a rule that anyone should get MySQL up and running in 15 minutes. Widenius was concerned about MySQL's sale to Oracle and has been watching as the popularity of MySQL has been declining. He said that Oracle was making a number of mistakes. Firstly new 'enterprise' extensions in MySQL were closed source, the bugs database is not public, and the MySQL public repositories are not anymore actively updated.

Widenius said that security problems were not communicated nor addressed quickly and instead of fixing bugs, Oracle is removing features. It is not all bad. Some of the new code is surprisingly good by Oracle, but unfortunately the quality varies and a notable part needs to be rewritten before we can include it in things like MariaDB. Widenius said that it's impossible for the community to work with the MySQL developers at Oracle as it doesn't accept patches, does not have a public roadmap and there was no way to discuss with MySQL developers how to implement things or how the current code works.

Basically Oracle has made the project less open and the beast has tanked, while at the same time more open versions of the code, such as MariaDB are rising in popularity.