I wonder if some distro repos will stop installing mariadb instead of mysql whenever you try to install mysql. Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development. (MariaDB.org seems to be still active, but there is now much more uncertainty (imo) compared to the mysql project)
> Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development. What actually happened is more like they changed their name, and sold the old name to Oracle. Oracle then forked and carried on developing a new product under the old name, while the original team carried on developing the old product under the new name (mariadb). That is why distros did what they did.
MariaDB is the fork, technically speaking. The distro switch took some time, probably in part because they wanted to wait and see if MariaDB would be suitable / sustainable.
Fedora and openSUSE switched to MariaDB in 2013, in part due to Oracle's license changes and changes to info published in CVEs and because they were considered easier to work with. (See: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/201...)