After coming this close to quitting six or seven months ago because he felt MySQL 5.1 wasn't ready to be released, MySQL co-founder and creator Monty Widenius has finally parted way with the company that made him rich.

He's going to run his own programming company, Monty Program AB, again and spend his idle hours dabbling in venture capital. He's looking for disruptive open source start-ups.

On his blog Monty says Sun still hasn't made the changes he wanted to fix MySQL's development and community problems.

He says, "The main reason for leaving was that I am not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed....In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow."

Monty Program is going to work on the MySQL transactional storage engine, Maria, as well as Mariadb, a branch of the MySQL database. (Maria is one of his kids.)

He says it will be a "true open source company" with 10-30 people who all own a piece of the action. Some of them will be Maria team members

"The plan," he says, "is to continue to work on the Maria project more or less as before. The main difference from before is that the Maria project and its mailing lists will move to launchpad and we will start using free-node for our IRC communications (channel #maria). Maria 1.5 (the crash-safe version of MyISAM) is now in beta and we hope to get binaries out soon. We have already started working on Maria 2.0 features (full transactional release) and performance issues. From my side there will be a small time delay in the Maria development (one-two months delay in the final release) as I have to set up things in the new company.

"Monty Program Ab will start working actively with the MySQL community to allow stable patches to the MySQL-5.1-Maria tree and create an active community around this tree. We will also do some restructuring of the MySQL code to make it simpler, faster and with fewer bugs.

"One shouldn't regard the MySQL-Maria tree as a fork," he says, "but as a branch as we intend to pull in all changes from the official tree to the MySQL-Maria tree; Some of the changes will probably be reworked but we will do our best to ensure that for the end user they should look and feel the same."

Monty Program will also do engineering work for customers on MySQL and Maria and put this work into the MySQL-Maria tree. Monty says, "If you want something to be done, fixed or changed in the MySQL server, please contact me at monty at askmonty.org for an offer."

He's also working on opening a new kind of restaurant that he says "will use databases to achieve a better customer experience. (Expect a special discount for database developers!)."

See http://monty-says.blogspot.com/, http://www.askmonty.org or http://www.openoceancapital.com.