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The author is right that usage is dropping, but that really has no bearing on whether or not it is open source. Technologies get replaced all the time regardless of the license they use.
Author is also being careful with the DB-Engines screen shot, usage of MySQL may be dropping, but it's still number two (below Oracle, above MSSQL - which shows the same curve, above Postgres, far above MariaDB and SQLite) https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend
From my experience MariaDB is not necessarily better than MySQL. The 8.x line brought many interesting features. I dream on switch to Postgres, and try every year but for my use case MySQL is still superior (100Bi+ rows for large texts, and heavy modified - I´m also space constrained - So I need data compression and the VACUUM are not good.)

The percona distribution is very good!

If space constrained and wanting compression, why not do that at the filesystem or block layer if it's not supported in the app?
From my experience, mariadb is about the same as mysql... depending on the queries, it can either be fine, or slow as balls. I'm actually considering switching to pgsql to see if its any better. /shrug
Is there anything in 8.0.x/8.4.x line that isn't present in MariaDb latest?
I'm not going to stop using it because it's not "true open source." I'm going to stop using it because there's better databases out there.
Who's still using MySQL on the back end? Most Linux distributions come with MariaDB. Is it Windows servers?
Obviously lots and lots of companies. Do you think a mature company just migrates to a different database unless it is absolutely necessary? That's a multi year project. I'm at a smaller company (around a 100 devs) and we have easily a dozen different production instances, some small and some larger with many replicas, etc.

New projects get MySQL too because we know it and it works.

Happily using MariaDB (as packaged with Debian) in production here...
I used MariaDB in Azure, but got notified it was retired. Anyway, migrated to sqlite.
I would argue that the reason to stop using it is that is a pretty bad piece of software to begin with, not because it's not "true open source" but hey, whatever floats your boat, right?
Oracle's icy touch. It was foretold. :D
Why would anyone use MySQL over Postgres in 2026?
One does not need to stop because "its not open source", one needs to switch because its no longer actively being developed.
my client insists on mysql to stay compatible with amazon RDS