A battle for MySQL’s heart – and future?
Signatories of a new open letter say they don't want to go down the "hostile fork" route.
Databases
A motley crew of open-source database lovers has gathered to try and twist Oracle’s stale grip away from the MySQL community and trademark.
The leader of a campaign for Oracle to relax its stewardship of the ubiquitous database insisted to The Stack that they didn’t want to go down the “hostile fork” route – but to work “alongside, not against” Oracle.
MySQL, which is 32 this year, is ubiquitous: DB Engines ranks it as the second most “popular” database management system (DBMS) globally.
As recently as 2021 Meta described it as powering “some of Facebook’s most important workloads” (views on this diverge.) Oracle says LinkedIn and Uber use it at enterprise scale and “more than 2,000 ISVs, OEMs, and VARs, including Ericsson and IBM” continue to tap it as the “embedded database to make their applications, hardware, and appliances more competitive.”
But public activity on the MySQL GitHub repository has slumped over the past year - leading to much criticism and the concern that Oracle may ultimately abandon its free, OSS, community edition. Sweeping layoffs of MySQL maintainers in 2025 did not help inspire confidence. And Postgres continues to surge in popularity as one of (many) potential alternatives.
Oracle moved to address concerns on February 12, pledging a “new era.”
Oracle’s MySQL community manager Frederick Descamps promised in a corporate blog that users would see a “decisive new approach to MySQL development,” a “focused three-pronged strategy”, new “developer-focused features into the MySQL Community Edition” and the expansion of “tools, frameworks, and connectors that enhance the MySQL experience…
That wasn’t enough to placate its critics.
In an open letter on February 17, they invited Oracle to co-create a “non-profit Foundation to support the MySQL community” and consider relinquishing the MySQL trademark for at least non-profit purposes.
The signatories’ criticism, in brief: MySQL development has been sparse and opaque, security-related bugs aren't publicly tracked, and Oracle has spent years “prioritizing proprietary enterprise features and HeatWave” – a proprietary service that lets users run Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) workloads directly from MySQL.
As The Stack published, the letter had 159 signatories. Some 66 of them work for Percona, a company that provides managed services for a wide range of open-source databases and which is driving the campaign.
Contacted for comment, Percona’s CTO Vadim Tkachenko told us: “MySQL retains fundamental architectural advantages that make it superior for massive scale and specific workloads… PostgreSQL is great but it is a very different database, so migration is not always feasible and even if it is it would take years in many complicated environments – see how long migration from Oracle to Open Source databases is taking…”
He added: Additionally, there is still a very loyal MySQL user base which does not want to be forced to move from MySQL due to Oracle neglect.”
Asked by The Stack why the community isn’t rallying around MariaDB, a fork of MySQL, he described it as an “important part of [the] broad MySQL ecosystem” but said there is now a "large feature gap" between MySQL and MariaDB, meaning they are no longer drop-in replacements for each other.
“There is [also] a lot of innovation going on in MySQL space beyond MariaDB – PlanetScale, VillageSQL, TiDB, AliSQL to name just a few,” he added, saying “We believe Open Source is about providing the choice [sic], not trying to choose the single winner.”
The ideal outcome, Percona’s CTO suggested, would be that Oracle agrees to create a “sustainable, neutral home for the MySQL community that drives adoption and collaboration for the whole MySQL Ecosystem.”
Oracle had not responded to a request for comment as The Stack published.
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