[drewdevault]

I'll defer to your on the ground expertise as to the relative popularity of each, but I will point out that we're both working with anecdata here. I might also suggest that MySQL is losing a lot of ground to Postgres and I don't expect that trend to reverse in any case.

In any case it's not very relevant to this thread because you're quite right in pointing out that MySQL uses a free software license (GPL).

[evanelias]

Yes, I mentioned the losing ground to Postgres aspect in my original comment. But that affects both MySQL and MariaDB, and still does not cause MariaDB to somehow be more popular than MySQL.

As for both working with anecdata, I mean sure, but what else is there? I'm citing my own business's direct experience with MySQL users and customers significantly outnumbering MariaDB users and customers, and seeing clear signs of that trend also being true at several much larger businesses (AWS, Azure, Percona, PlanetScale).

I suspect your view may be skewed by Linux distros / package managers having replaced MySQL with MariaDB many years ago. But even that is starting to change, see https://lwn.net/Articles/960630/ for example.