The next version of Slackware Linux will drop MySQL in favour of MariaDB. The change was announced on the front page of the site and in the project’s change log by Patrick Volkerding. Slackware is following a trend within Linux distributions of switching away from Oracle’s MySQL to the MariaDB Foundation’s MariaDB, a fork of MySQL created when Oracle acquired Sun and, with it, MySQL. Community fears of Oracle closing MySQL or charging licence fees for the community edition have prompted distributions such as Fedora and also openSUSE to switch to MariaDB as their default database. Slackware appears, though, to be going further – it is completely replacing MySQL with MariaDB rather than just selecting it as a default.