WHile I despise this new licensing, your redition of history is not correct
Monty sold MySQL to Sun, he believed Sun would be good steward of the project, provide it the resources it needed, and allow it to flourish remaining Open Source
When Oracle bought Sun, Monty and most of the MySQL devs where very very very very very concerned that Orcale would be detrimental to MySQL going forward so they forked it and founded MariaDB to replace Oracle's mySQL
Some of their fears never came to be, but Oracle has closed the development of mysql is many ways, it is not as bad as it was orginally feared, but it no where near as open as it was under Sun.
It was symptomatic of their lack of financial control thats for sure.
It doesn't matter how popular it is, if you are going to spend $1bn of your shareholders money on it, it needs to generate the revenue - and Sun never figured it out.
It did not have enough time to become profitable. Sun bought Mysql in 2008, they were looking to sell to IBM in late 2008/early 2009, and by April 2009 had a tentative deal with Oracle...
Monty sold MySQL to Sun, he believed Sun would be good steward of the project, provide it the resources it needed, and allow it to flourish remaining Open Source
When Oracle bought Sun, Monty and most of the MySQL devs where very very very very very concerned that Orcale would be detrimental to MySQL going forward so they forked it and founded MariaDB to replace Oracle's mySQL
Some of their fears never came to be, but Oracle has closed the development of mysql is many ways, it is not as bad as it was orginally feared, but it no where near as open as it was under Sun.