"It came as no surprise to those who follow MySQL that
Monty Program Ab, Widenius' MySQL database engineering company, and
Percona, a MySQL services and support firm, announced on May 13th
that they were forming a vendor-neutral consortium, "The Open
Database Alliance," to become MySQL's industry hub.
"What they have in mind is to use Widenius' own branch of MySQL,
MariaDB, and its derivative code, binaries, training, support, and
other enhancements as the new "MySQL industry hub." According to
Widenius, "MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL; all commands,
interfaces, libraries and APIs [Application Programming Interface]
that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB.""