The Minority Report

It’s official, Michael Widenius has resigned from Sun Microsystems to pursue other things with MySQL. He’s left to work full time at his new company, Monty Program Ab.

Looks like he’s going to be working on the Maria engine, a transactional storage engine for MySQL, Mariadb, a branch of the MySQL database with the Maria storage engine and other projects as they come up.

Good luck Michael.

Monty says: Time to move on

The three months did stretch out to seven months, and the changes I had hoped Sun would apply to in the MySQL Database group to fix our development and community problems did not happen fast enough.

Sun and I concluded in the end that I have much higher chances of achieving my goals outside of Sun, so it’s just better to swallow the bitter apple, go out and get things going. We parted in good terms and we both expect to continue to do business and work together.

The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.