MySQL founder Monty Widenius has left Sun to pursue other ventures with his company, Monty Program AB. His departure follows a very public flap over bugs in MySQL 5.1 and months of rumors.MySQL founder Monty Widenius has packed his bags. No, really this time.
Widenius, who came over to Sun Microsystems when the company acquired MySQL AB last January, announced in a blog post that
he has moved on. His departure is hardly a surprise; rumors that he had
already left first circulated months ago, though Widenius himself
stayed on. Now, however, citing the IT industry version of irreconcilable differences, the MySQL founder has packed his bags.
In this case, the rumors had some elements of truth to them, he
wrote. I had told management that I thus would be submitting my
resignation immediately as I strongly believed that the [MySQL] 5.1
release was not ready and that those problems needed to be fixed before
it went GA.
This action, together with other peoples efforts, did have the
wanted effect and I made an agreement with Sun's upper management to
not initiate my resignation but instead stay around for three more
months to help Sun work out things in MySQL Development and also give
Sun a chance to create an optimal role for me within Sun, he added.
Three months turned into seven, and the changes he had hoped for in
Suns MySQL Database Group did not materialize fast enough, he wrote.
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, he continued. In particular I would have liked 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.
For its part, Sun defended the GA release
of MySQL 5.1 when Widenius raised red flags back in late November. The
company noted that not everyone in the MySQL community agreed with
Widenius assessment of the MySQL 5.1 bugs, and said the open-source
database goes through an extensive quality assurance process.
I still think that Sun was the best possible buyer for MySQL and I
feel sad that things didn't work out together, Widenius wrote. Sun
has a lot of good things going on and I hope that they will continue
their path to create and promote open source. I will be available for
Sun in helping them with their goals in the open source space.
Widenius said he will be leaving to work with his own company, Monty
Program Ab. Among other things, the company will focus on a
transactional storage engine for MySQL called Maria, as well as
Mariadb, a branch of the MySQL database with the Maria storage engine.
The company will also do NRE (Non-recurring engineering) to customers
on MySQL and Maria and put this work into the MySQL-Maria tree,
Widenius wrote.
Monty Program Ab will be a true open-source company, with the
additional goal of being a smaller, family-oriented company where
everyone can be owners of the company, where we care about our
employees and strive to have fun together and share the profit we
create, he wrote.
He added he would continue to work with and invest in disruptive
technology startup companies that do open source and community products.
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