Monty says

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about “hard” or “soft” forks related to MySQL. As someone who has done a successful fork of MySQL, I think this is both confusing and trivialising the concept of forking.
In my previous blog,  I did touch a bit on this topic, but it looks like some more clarifications are needed....

It is 15 years since the first MariaDB server release of MariaDB 5.1.38 on 29'th of October 2009.
MariaDB got its name from my youngest daughter Maria, following the tradition of MySQL, who got its name from my oldest daughter My.
The MariaDB project started on April 20 2009, the same day when Oracle announced that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems, who owned MySQL. The initial MariaDB engineering team consisted of some 20 engineers from the MySQL server team at Sun, and me. It...

MariaDB 11.0-Alpha preview  is now available for download!
MariaDB 11.0 is in essence a "new optimizer cost model" release.
There are also some other features , but I will concentrate this blog post on the 11.0 optimizer changes.

Yesterday was a big day for me and everyone involved in MariaDB when MariaDB Corporation (Now MariaDB plc) was listed on the New York Stock Exchange ! (NYSE:MRDB)
This has been a long journey, starting from the exodus of MySQL developers from Sun Microsystems to Monty Program in 2009 as part of the announcement of Oracle acquiring Sun....