Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
In the Nextcloud Community Conference 2025, which has just been summarised in Greek, Michael “Monty” Widenius from Helsinki, Finland (where RMS speaks in 7 days) showed this slide:
Love him or hate him, he planted the seeds of this moment. Even Keith Packard admitted in a public talk that Richard Stallman was right about the GPL (copyleft).
Their differences typically boil down to style, not substance.
The other co-founder of MySQL (David Axmark) is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously. MySQL was named after Michael, not David, and the licence chosen was GPLv2, i.e. copyleft. █