david.axmark

Been involved in FLOSS Software since the early eighties. Me and some friends needed software for some homemade hardware (real hardware cost like a house at that time). Project got killed later when we could just afford to buy a unix machines. The proprietary unix machines lacked a lot of useful software so we added tons of FLOSS stuff.

Started to read FSB (Free Software as Business) mailing list in the early nineties and saw how dual licensing worked well for Ghostscript. We needed a SQL database for our consultant work and could not find one that worked. So I had the idea that we could write one ourself using the pieces we already had (Monty had written a tty based database and that had lots of libraries we could use).

This worked out an in 1995 we started with MySQL, the first more global release was made at the end of 1996. This turned in to MySQL AB who got bought by Sun who was bought by Oracle. I left the company half a year after Sun bough us since I am not a big company person at all.

Since then I have followed the developments in the MySQL ekosystem with special focus on Drizzle and MariaDB.