Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source

Summary

If you care about supporting open source software, and still use MySQL in 2026, you should switch to MariaDB like so many others have already done.The number of git commits on github.com/mysql/mysql-server has been significantly declining in 2025. The screenshot below shows the state of git commits as of writing this in January 2026, and the picture should be alarming to anyone who cares about software being open source.This is not surprising – Oracle should not be trusted as the steward for open source projectsWhen Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and MySQL along with it back in 2009, the European Commission almost blocked the deal due to concerns that Oracle’s goal was just to stifle competition. The deal went through as Oracle made a commitment to keep MySQL going and not kill it, but (to nobody’s surprise) Oracle has not been a good steward of MySQL as an open source project and the community around it has been withering away for years now. All development is done behind closed doors. The publicly visible bug tracker is not the real one Oracle staff actually uses for MySQL development, and the few people who try to contribute to MySQL just see their Pull Requests and patch submissions marked as received with mostly no feedback and then those changes may or may not be in the next MySQL release, often rewritten, and with only Oracle staff in the git author/committer fields. The real author only gets a small mention in a blog post. When I was the engineering manager for the core team working on RDS MySQL and RDS MariaDB at Amazon Web Services, I oversaw my engineers’ contributions to both MySQL and MariaDB (the latter being a fork of MySQL by the original MySQL author, Michael Widenius). All the software developers in my org disliked submitting code to MySQL due to how bad the reception by Oracle was to their contributions.MariaDB is the stark opposite with all development taking place in real-time on github.com/mariadb/server, anyone being able to submit a Pull Re...