Giuseppe "The Data Charmer" Maxia recently posted his take on the MySQL forks. I had been pondering whether to do the same, and seeing that what I planned to write will nicely complement Giuseppe's article, I was inspired to follow him into the same topic. Note that last Spring I created a Map of MySQL forks in preparation for Monty's keynote at the MySQL user conference. So let's see how things have evolved. I'll look into MySQL ecosystem as a whole and the forks separately.
The post is long, but the key takeaway is that despite the challenges, the combined development seen in the MySQL ecosystem is probably stronger than ever, the current situation is hard for an outsider to grasp but manageable, and if a few more obstacles can be overcome, we are looking into a very bright future indeed. There are more than 100 engineers (how much more?) working full time on the mysql code base (including both developers, QA, build engineers...). This development effort is an order of magnitude higher than other open source databases I'm aware of, in particular PostgreSQL and Drizzle. Often the open source project with most momentum and mass will come out as the winner, no matter what challenges it may seemingly be facing, and this is the case with MySQL too.
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