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. █
Correction: The article said that MySQL was "named after Michael" (My-Kel), but it was in fact named by Michael and not after himself. "My is a girl's name," we're told, "specifically one of his daughters. Maria is another daughter. Unfortunately Oracle holds the copyright so the MariaDB fork of MySQL does not help Monty that much as he is thus not in a position to do dual licensing. So the new business model competes more closely against PostgreSQL but without the non-reciprocal license which attracts certain corporate types."