MariaDB Doesn't Depend on MySQL

When MariaDB was first announced in 2009 by Michael “Monty” Widenius , it was positioned as a “fork of MySQL”. I think that was a Bad Idea™. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea as such. After all, MariaDB indeed is a fork of MySQL. But what is a fork in the software sense, and how is this reflected in MariaDB? A fork is a software project that takes the source code of another project and continues development independently from the original. Forks often start by maintaining compatibility with their parent project, but they can evolve to become detached from their own features, architecture, bug tracker, mailing list, development philosophy, and community. This is the case of MariaDB, with the addition that it continues to be highly compatible with old MySQL versions and with its current ecosystem at large.