From the 'It was only a matter of time' files:

I met MySQL founder Monty Widenius last year in Portland and he wasn't particularly thrilled with Sun at the time - he was however publicly hopeful that things would improve for him. Apparently they didn't. Widenius has now officially resigned from Sun.

Widenius has now set up a new company called Monty Program AB. His new company so far has a basic MediaWiki- based wiki that clearly indicates he intends to keep working on MySQL database elements, specifically the Maria engine -- albeit outside of the confines of Sun Microsystems.

Widenius was livid about the way that the MySQL 5.1 release happened which he thought was incomplete and loaded with bugs. Sun countered that Widenuis was entitled to his opinion, but in its view MySQL 5.1 was a solid release.

"The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed," Widenius blogged.

He added that he parted on good terms with Sun and he expects to continue to do business and work together with Sun. In parting, Widenius had kind words for Sun which in part were a faint echo of things he said last year during a keynote at OSCON.

"I still think that Sun was the best possible buyer for MySQL and I feel sad that things didn't work out together. Sun has a lot of good things going on and I hope that they will continue their path to create and promote Open source. I will be available for Sun in helping them with their goals in the open source space," Widenius wrote.

So now instead of working inside of Sun on MySQL, Widenius will try and make a go of it outside of Sun working on MySQL. The Maria engine is not intended to be a fork of MySQL according to Widenius. It will be interesting to see how this works out over time. Certainly MySQL, as a database, is a modular platform and it's all open source, giving tremendous extensibility.

Between Brian Aker's Drizzle pulling MySQL one way and now Maria going the other, let's just hope for MySQL's sake that all this activity doesn't ultimately end up in three separate forks of the same database.