The developers of Fedora Linux are pondering a slap in the face for Oracle by picking MariaDB as the database for the forthcoming Fedora 19.

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, bills itself as a “drop-in replacement” for the database and is the result of efforts by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL.

Red Hatter Jaroslav Reznik proposed the move and offered the following reasons for it in a fedoraproject.org list, here:

“The original company behind MySQL, MySQL AB, were bought out by Sun which was then bought by Oracle. Recent changes made by Oracle indicate they are moving the MySQL project to be more closed. They are no longer publishing any useful information about security issues (CVEs), and they are not providing complete regression tests any more, and a very large fraction of the mysql bug database is now not public.”

MariaDB, Reznik wrote, “... has a more open-source attitude and an active community. We have found them to be much easier to work with, especially in regards to security matters.”

If Fedora 19 adopts MariaDB, it will also make MySQL available “for at least one more release.” The change would also mean a fork of sorts for the OS: users would have to chose between versions bundling one database or the other, as concurrent installations would not be permitted.

Any change could happen quickly. Fedora 18 only emerged earlier this month, but the feature submission deadline for Fedora 19 is 29 January and it is hoped the OS will be ready in May 2013. ®