The Fedora team earlier announced that they would be ditching the 'troubled' MySQL and move to MariaDB which was created by the founders of MySQL and is fully compatible with the database. A discussion was going on in the openSUSE teams about the default database.

Michal Hrušecký, the maintainer of MySQL for SuSE Linux and an openSUSE booster has announced that openSUSE will 'dump' MySQL and use MariaDB as the default database from 12.3 onwards. openSUSE started shipping with MySQL with version 11.3 in 2010.

 Switching to MariaDB doesn't make much difference to users or developer as "MariaDB is MySQL fork – drop-in replacement for MySQL. Still same API, still same protocol, even same utilities. And mostly the same datafiles. So unless you have some deep optimizations depending on your current version, you should see no difference. And what will switch mean?" writes Hrušecký.

This decision, as I confirmed with Jos Poortvliet, makes openSUSE the first major distro to ship with MariaDB as the default database.

In an exclusive interview with Muktware, MariaDB team earlier said, "MariaDB is a community developed, feature enhanced and backward compatible database. It is purely community driven, and anyone can become a Maria Captain (i.e. gain commit rights into the tree). It is backed largely by Monty Program Ab, but there are many other companies who spend time and resources into making MariaDB better. This list is not limited to: SkySQL, Percona, Open Query, and more."

MySQL will be the second leading open source project, after openOffice, which will meet its ill fate under Oracle. User will still be able to use MySQL as they can install it manually.