‘Monty’ Widenius, founder of the world’s most widely used RDBMS — MySQL — visited SYSLAB today.
MySQL was recently aquired by Oracle Corporation with the consequence that the way by which its produced and marketed is rapidly changing.
Currently Monty heads a company called Monty Program that organises the development of MariaDB, a drop-in replacement for MySQL. The production of MariaDB follows the old MySQL tradition of agility, to be free and open source (yes, there is a difference!), and providing for the needs of users.
Discussions revolved around how MariaDB could be used in the courses given at SYSLAB and how closer collaborations could be established.
It was a very pleasurable and informative meeting.