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Ulf Michael Widenius — "Monty" to anyone who has ever met him — has a habit that is either deeply sentimental or completely insane depending on how you look at it: he names databases after his daughters.
Not metaphorically. Not as a marketing gesture. Literally. His eldest daughter is named My. The database he spent the better part of two decades building is called MySQL. His middle child is Max. When he worked on a storage partnership with SAP in the early 2000s, the resulting product was MaxDB. And his youngest daughter — born after everything was already in motion, after the code had already wrapped itself around the world's internet infrastructure — is named Maria. When the day came that he needed to save everything he'd built from a corporation he believed would quietly let it die, the fork he wrote was called MariaDB.
This is not a story about software. Software is just the medium. This is a story about a man who spent thirty years building something he loved, then watched it get sold twice, and the second time decided he would not watch quietly.
Monty Widenius was born in 1962. He started writing database software in 1979, before most people had heard the word "database." By 1982, working in Helsinki, he had already built something he called UNIREG — a low-level indexed database system, written from scratch. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't meant to be. It was fast, it worked, and it was his.
In 1985, he co-founded TCX DataKonsult AB, a Swedish data warehousing company, with an entrepreneur named Allan Larsson. Widenius ran the technical side from Helsinki. Larsson and a programmer named David Axmark handled things from Sweden. For years this arrangement — a Finn and two Swedes building database tools across the Baltic — was their whole world. Small customers, custom work, UNIREG doing most of the lifting.
By 1994, the internet had arrived and changed what "database" meant. TCX's clients wanted web applications. UNIREG, designed for a different era, couldn't keep up. Monty looked at the alternatives. The most accessible option was something called mSQL — Minerva SQL — a lightweight relational database by an Australian developer named David Hughes. It was cheap. It was popular. It was gaining traction.
It also had no index support.
Widenius contacted Hughes directly. He proposed integrating UNIREG's battle-tested ISAM handler with mSQL's query layer. Hughes, already building toward mSQL 2 with his own indexing architecture in place, declined.
Widenius went back to Helsinki and wrote a new database instead.
The first public version of MySQL appeared on that date. It was an internal tool — built for TCX's own web projects — that kept the same API as mSQL so existing applications could migrate without rewriting their queries. The name came from Widenius's daughter. My. She was a child. He was a programmer who thought "MySQL" had a clean ring to it, that combining a family name with a technical acronym was a reasonable thing to do, and apparently nobody disagreed with him.
David Axmark, meanwhile, had been spending evenings on Usenet. On mailing lists like gnu.misc.discuss and free-software-as-business, he had found something that would shape the company's entire identity: a licensing model used by a program called Aladdin Ghostscript. You could use the software free if you were open source. If you were commercial, you paid. Axmark thought this was the answer to a question nobody at TCX had fully asked yet — how do you build a real business and give code away at the same time?
That tension — idealism and commerce, free software and survival — would follow MySQL for the next thirteen years.
MySQL spread through the 1990s web the way water finds cracks. It was fast. It was free for open-source use. It ran on Linux. And it sat perfectly in what would become known as the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Every startup that couldn't afford Oracle, every developer working from a rented apartment, every open-source project that needed persistence landed on MySQL.
By 2000, MySQL AB was a real company. That year, Widenius, Axmark, and Larsson moved MySQL to the GPL license. The decision cratered revenues by 80% immediately. A pure ideological bet — put the code fully into the commons and trust that the market would reward the decision — placed at the cost of nearly breaking their own company.
It took a full year to recover.
They did recover. More than recovered.
In 2001, they hired Mårten Mickos as CEO. Mickos was Nordic, business-minded, and exactly the counterweight a company of programmers needed. Under his leadership, MySQL AB began taking enterprise contracts seriously, scaling a salesforce, and flirting with an IPO. By 2006, the company employed 320 people across 25 countries, with 70% of staff working fully remotely — a distributed model almost unprecedented at the time.
MySQL ran Facebook. It ran Google. It ran Wikipedia. It ran every WordPress site, every Drupal install, every PHP forum on the early internet.
Widenius had named a database after his eldest daughter. The database had become the infrastructure of the modern world.
Sun Microsystems announced it was acquiring MySQL AB for approximately one billion dollars.
One billion dollars for a piece of software that started because David Hughes had already planned his own indexing system.
Widenius and Axmark celebrated with everyone else, and then — quietly, within months — both left Sun. Axmark first, then Widenius in February 2009. The official reason Widenius gave was professional: Sun's MySQL development group hadn't evolved the way he'd hoped. He wanted open development. He wanted outside contributors treated as equals. Sun hadn't moved fast enough on either.
He left on good terms. He said so publicly. He started a small company in Helsinki called Monty Program Ab. He focused on a storage engine he'd been developing called Maria — named, again, after a daughter. He wasn't sure yet what any of it would become.
Then April 20, 2009 happened.
Oracle Corporation was built on databases. Relational databases. Larry Ellison's company had spent three decades making Oracle Database the enterprise standard — the thing that banks, governments, and Fortune 500 companies paid enormous sums to run. Oracle Database cost what a small country's IT budget might cost. That was not an accident. That was the product.
MySQL was, in the most direct technical sense, Oracle's competitor.
Not equally, and not in the enterprise deals Oracle cared most about. But MySQL had been eating into the market for years. Every application that ran MySQL was an application that had decided not to run Oracle. Every startup that chose LAMP was a company that might grow into an enterprise Oracle customer — or might not. When Oracle announced in April 2009 that it was acquiring Sun Microsystems — and therefore MySQL — for what amounted to $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt, the open-source database community went quiet for a moment.
Then Widenius started writing.
On December 12, 2009, Widenius published a post on his personal blog, monty-says.blogspot.com, titled "Help saving MySQL." It was not a polished press release. It was a man who had spent, by his own count, twenty-seven years of his life building MySQL, typing in plain language what he was afraid of.
He asked people to write to the European Commission.
His argument was precise. Oracle had financial incentives to weaken MySQL — not destroy it outright, because a destroyed MySQL was worth nothing, but a weakened MySQL was worth something enormous. His exact words: "A weak MySQL is worth about one billion dollars per year to Oracle, maybe more. A strong MySQL could never generate enough income for Oracle that they would want to cannibalize their real cash cow."
Oracle had made specific commitments about MySQL to regulators. Widenius listed what they had not committed to:
The silences in Oracle's commitments were the argument.
He also addressed the people who said: just fork it, Monty. The code is open source. You can always fork it. He was patient about this. A fork, he explained, is not enough. The code is only part of what MySQL is. MySQL is also a trademark, a business infrastructure, a copyright holder, a decade of relationships. A fork without all of that is a branch, not a tree.
The blog post received 60,000 hits. It generated approximately 10,000 emails to the European Commission. A petition gathered over 50,000 signatures from developers and users across the world.
The European Commission investigated. They extended their review timeline. They forced Oracle to make additional public commitments about MySQL's future — including a promise to maintain the dual-licensing model through at least 2015 and keep MySQL development open.
It was something. It was not everything Widenius had asked for.
On January 27, 2010, Oracle completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. MySQL came with it.
Widenius had already begun building what he would name after Maria.
The word "fork" sounds violent, like something that splits and bleeds. In practice it is more like a photocopy — you take the code at a specific moment, carry it into a new repository, and start making changes the original will never see.
Widenius had been quietly preparing. Monty Program Ab, his Helsinki company founded in February 2009 the moment he left Sun, had spent months developing the Maria storage engine — a crash-safe, ACID-compliant replacement for MySQL's default MyISAM engine. That work became the seed.
On October 29, 2009 — before Oracle had even finished acquiring Sun — Widenius released MariaDB 5.1.38.
The version number was not accidental. It matched MySQL 5.1.38 exactly. Every application, every driver, every configuration that worked with MySQL would work with MariaDB without a single line of changed code. Binary compatibility. Drop-in replacement. You could swap MySQL for MariaDB and your application would not notice.
The name on the package: his youngest daughter.
MariaDB. Because he had already used My for MySQL and Max for MaxDB, and because Maria was the child who arrived after everything else — the one named into a future he was still building.
(The irony of the storage engine naming requires a footnote: the engine inside MariaDB was originally called Maria, which created confusion between the product and the component. They held a contest to rename it. The engine was renamed Aria. Maria — the daughter — kept her name.)
The open-source community does not simply follow someone because they founded the original project. There is a cynicism to it, a wait-and-see quality. Developers have seen too many rescue forks that begin with enthusiasm and end with an unmaintained repository and a dead mailing list.
Widenius understood this. So did Axmark and Larsson, both of whom joined in establishing what would become the MariaDB Foundation in December 2012 — a nonprofit entity, governed by a board, funded by corporate sponsors but structurally independent of any single company. The point was to make MariaDB not-just-Monty's-project. It was to make it an institution.
In April 2013, Monty Program Ab merged with SkySQL Corporation Ab to form MariaDB Corporation Ab — a commercial entity to support enterprise deployments, separate from but aligned with the nonprofit Foundation. The two-entity structure — foundation for governance, corporation for business — mirrored the model that had made Red Hat and Linux sustainable.
The harder work was with the people who had built their careers on MySQL — the database administrators, the system integrators, the Linux distribution maintainers who decided what shipped as the default on millions of servers.
Widenius and his team had a few arguments. MariaDB was faster in benchmarks on several query types. MariaDB was fully GPL, with no confusing dual-license edge cases. MariaDB's development was open — issues tracked publicly, contributions accepted without corporate review gatekeeping. MariaDB would never have an enterprise-only feature withheld from the community version.
And underneath all the technical arguments, something harder to articulate: the man who wrote MySQL is writing this. If you trusted MySQL then, this is where that trust went.
In 2012, the Linux distribution Mageia — small, community-driven — became the first to ship MariaDB as the default database instead of MySQL. It was a quiet signal. Someone had to go first.
openSUSE 12.3, released in March 2013, replaced MySQL with MariaDB 5.5 as its default relational database. The openSUSE community cited MariaDB's fully open development model.
Fedora 19, released in July 2013, did the same. The Fedora project's announcement was explicit: the switch was prompted, in part, by uncertainty about Oracle's stewardship of MySQL. Fedora wanted a truly open-source MySQL implementation.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, released in June 2014, shipped MariaDB as its default. When RHEL moves, CentOS moves. When CentOS moves, an enormous percentage of the world's production servers move.
Arch Linux moved. Debian moved — MariaDB became the default from Debian 9 onward. Manjaro followed Arch.
On April 22, 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation completed migrating the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia, and Wikidata from MySQL 5.1 to MariaDB 5.5.
The announcement came from Asher Feldman, Wikimedia's site architect. His explanation was both technical and philosophical. Technically: MariaDB's query optimizer showed 4–15% performance improvements on production load. The XtraDB storage engine — Percona's high-performance MySQL replacement that MariaDB bundled — offered buffer pool preservation and other features MySQL didn't. Wikipedia handled roughly 50,000 database queries per second at peak. Every percentage of performance was real.
But Feldman also said something else. "As supporters of the free culture movement, the Wikimedia Foundation strongly prefers free software projects." Oracle's MySQL had bifurcated source code between free and enterprise editions. MariaDB did not. For an organization whose entire mission is the free flow of information, the choice carried something close to a moral dimension.
The world's fifth-most-visited website had chosen the fork.
Oracle never destroyed MySQL. Widenius may have been wrong about some things — or perhaps the EU commitments and public pressure held Oracle back from the worst possibilities. MySQL still exists. Oracle still ships it. It still has a large user base and active development.
But something happened anyway. Something quieter and more permanent than a shutdown.
The community moved.
Not all of it. Not overnight. But the gravitational center of the MySQL ecosystem shifted. The developers who cared most about open-source principles, who ran Linux distributions, who maintained the infrastructure of major websites — they made a choice. When they had to pick a default, they increasingly picked MariaDB.
By 2013, Widenius had done something almost unprecedented in software: he had successfully forked a major open-source project and made the fork more legitimate, in the eyes of the open-source community, than the original. Not more widely installed. Not necessarily better on every technical metric. But more trusted. More open. More his — and therefore, paradoxically, more the community's.
Here is the detail that makes it human: the MariaDB logo is a sea lion.
Widenius chose it himself. The story goes that during a snorkeling trip to the Galapagos Islands, he was in the water with his eldest daughter My — the daughter MySQL was named after — when something large, brown, and fast appeared directly in front of them. A sea lion. It hung in the water for a moment, apparently delighted by the terrified tourists, then shot away laughing.
He wanted MariaDB to have an animal mascot, following the open-source tradition. (MySQL's mascot was a dolphin.) He wanted something that felt fast and surprising and a little bit mischievous. He remembered the sea lion.
His youngest daughter Maria — the one the database is named after, who was too young for the Galapagos trip — later posed for a selfie with an actual sea lion. Her retroactive blessing on the mascot. Both daughters, one logo. The whole family, encoded into the symbol.
Three databases. Three children. My, Max, Maria. MySQL, MaxDB, MariaDB.
It is the most specific thing about Monty Widenius — this habit of inscribing family into code — and it is also the thing that makes the whole story legible. He was not building products. He was building things that mattered. You name something after your children when you expect it to outlast you. You name it after your children when you want to remember, at 2am in a Helsinki winter, what you are actually doing and why it is worth doing.
The database named after his eldest daughter was captured by a corporation. The database named after his youngest daughter was designed from its first commit to be uncapturable.
MariaDB today powers the infrastructure of hundreds of millions of websites. It is the default database in most major Linux distributions. It runs Wikipedia. It is the MySQL the open-source world chose when it got to choose.
Widenius remains active — in the MariaDB Foundation's governance, in interviews where he is reliably direct about what Oracle has and hasn't done right, in the code itself.
The MariaDB Foundation is a nonprofit. Its mission: to be the steward of free and open MySQL-related software. It takes money from corporate sponsors. It makes decisions in the open.
It is, in its structure, the thing Widenius always said he wanted MySQL to be.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1979 | Widenius begins writing database software in Helsinki |
| 1982 | Builds UNIREG, a low-level indexed database system |
| 1985 | TCX DataKonsult AB co-founded (Widenius, Larsson, Axmark) |
| 1994 | MySQL development begins; mSQL integration attempt with David Hughes fails |
| 1995 | MySQL 1.0 releases (May 23). Named after daughter My |
| 2000 | MySQL switches to GPL license; revenues fall 80%, recover over one year |
| 2001 | Mårten Mickos hired as CEO; MySQL AB scales into enterprise |
| 2008 | Sun Microsystems acquires MySQL AB for $1 billion (January) |
| 2009 | Widenius leaves Sun (February), founds Monty Program Ab |
| 2009 | Oracle announces acquisition of Sun (April 20) |
| 2009 | MariaDB 5.1.38 released — the first fork (October 29) |
| 2009 | "Save MySQL" blog post published; 50,000+ sign petition (December 12) |
| 2010 | Oracle completes Sun acquisition (January 27); MySQL changes hands |
| 2012 | Mageia becomes first Linux distro to default to MariaDB |
| 2012 | MariaDB Foundation announced (December) |
| 2013 | openSUSE 12.3 defaults to MariaDB (March) |
| 2013 | Monty Program Ab + SkySQL merge into MariaDB Corporation Ab (April) |
| 2013 | Wikipedia migrates to MariaDB (April 22) |
| 2013 | Fedora 19 defaults to MariaDB (July) |
| 2014 | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ships MariaDB as default |
Michael "Monty" Widenius — Finnish programmer, born 1962. Co-creator of MySQL. Creator of MariaDB. Named three databases after three daughters. Still active in MariaDB development.
David Axmark — Swedish programmer, MySQL co-founder. Developed the dual-licensing strategy that made MySQL AB a sustainable business. Left Sun shortly after the acquisition. Joined the MariaDB Foundation.
Allan Larsson — Swedish entrepreneur. Third co-founder of MySQL AB. Co-founder of Monty Program Ab and the MariaDB Foundation.
Mårten Mickos — CEO of MySQL AB 2001–2008. Transformed the project into an enterprise-viable business. Left Sun in 2009 after the acquisition.
My Widenius — Monty's eldest daughter. The M in MySQL. Present for the Galapagos sea lion encounter that inspired MariaDB's logo.
Max Widenius — Monty's middle child. The namesake of MaxDB.
Maria Widenius — Monty's youngest daughter. The database is named after her. She later posed for a selfie with a sea lion, giving her retroactive blessing to the mascot.
The emotional spine: A man who names databases after his daughters spent twenty-seven years building MySQL. When he watched it get sold to the one company most likely to kill it quietly, he forked it and named it after the child born while he was building everything else.
The contrast that lands: Oracle bought MySQL because MySQL was worth one billion dollars a year as a weakened competitor. Widenius forked MySQL because he had spent twenty-seven years making sure it was worth more than that.
The underdog sequence: Mageia went first — a small community distro no one watched. Then openSUSE. Then Fedora. Then Red Hat. Then Wikipedia. Every one of them chose the fork over the original. Not because they had to. Because they wanted to.
The human detail that sticks: The sea lion logo came from a snorkeling trip in the Galapagos. Widenius was in the water with his eldest daughter My — the girl MySQL was named after — when a sea lion appeared out of nowhere, laughed in their faces, and vanished. He chose it for the logo of the project named after his youngest daughter. Both daughters, one mascot. The whole family, encoded into a symbol.
The line that closes it: He named databases after his daughters because he expected the databases to outlast him. He was right about that. He was also right that they needed protecting. One daughter's name he couldn't save. The other one he built so that no corporation could buy it out from under her.
