MySQL AB

Michael "Monty" Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson founded the company in 1995 around MySQL, named after Widenius's daughter My. The business model was dual licensing: the code was free under the GPL, but anyone wanting to ship it inside a closed product bought a commercial licence. It was also an early fully distributed company, with staff spread across some thirty countries.

In 2008 Sun bought MySQL AB for about a billion dollars. Two years later Sun itself was bought by Oracle, which already sold the world's most expensive competing database. By then Widenius had left and started the MariaDB fork — named after his younger daughter, Maria.