Just went down the rabbit-hole of the acquisition of MySQL as I was bored. What a fascinating story.

Dude who made originally made it in 1995, Michael Widenius, named it after his daughter My, hence MySQL. He sold it to Sun for $1 billion in 2008. He then turned around, forked the software, and produced MariaDB (I always wondered why it was named that) starting a new organization around it in 2009. It’s functionally nearly identical, often able to be used as a drop in replacement, assuming you aren’t using new features developed after the fork. Last month, he sold it again to some private equity firm (yay…). What a guy.

Unfortunately, he’s run out of daughters to name software after and already used his son’s name for something else, so we might be at the end of open source community driving DB solutions from Michael.