Monty Widenius 'heartbroken' over Oracle's MySQL job cuts

Oracle has instigated "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team, sparking concern about the future of one of the world's most popular open-source databases.

It looks like multiple great, tenured people were laid off from MySQL team at Oracle – Peter Zaitsev

Around 70 members of the team behind the open source database have been shown the door as part of Oracle's latest round of redundancies, according to one high-level source in the MySQL community.

The Register has asked Oracle to respond and clarify its position and we'll update this article if we hear back.

Michael "Monty" Widenius, who co-authored the original MySQL in the 1990s, posted that he was "Heartbroken to hear about the widespread layoffs at MySQL last week, and while I'm not surprised that Oracle is going in this direction with MySQL, it still saddens me that it's come to this."

In the early 2000s, MySQL became the M in LAMP, the de facto standard used to build web-facing systems, which also included the Linux operating system, Apache web server, and programming languages such as Perl, PHP, or Python. Social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, as well as a league of fledgling internet companies, based their infrastructure on MySQL.

The open source database was initially owned by MySQL AB, a Swedish company, until it was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2008. Oracle then bought Sun in 2009.

Although the early part of Oracle’s management of MySQL has attracted praise, more recently, concerns have emerged over Big Red's continuing custodianship of the system.

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In 2024, Peter Zaitsev, who worked as a performance engineer at MySQL, said Oracle's MySQL development efforts had become swayed by Heatwave, a proprietary analytics database service based on MySQL.

Community sources told The Register that Oracle's open source MySQL team has become part of the Heatwave unit, meanwhile Oracle is prioritizing resources on AI.

Zaitsev, who helped found open source database consultancy Percona, said in a post this week: "It looks like multiple great, tenured people were laid off from MySQL team at Oracle. My heart goes out to impacted individuals, yet I also wonder if it is another significant step by Oracle towards slowly killing MySQL Community edition."

Widenius went on to fork MySQL to create MariaDB, a company which experienced a disastrous flotation in late 2022 before being taken private last year, returning its core product to a more permissive open source model.

In his post, Widenius said: "Fifteen years ago, we wanted to solidify a future for the next generation of MySQL and that's exactly what we're doing with MariaDB." ®