[From The Register]
MySQL, the lovable little database engine that could – for reasonable values of could – is starting to feel the pain of being an open source project distributed by a large company.
With a slower release cycle, community contributions are having a hard time making it into the mainline codebase, and an illicit market for patches and forks is emerging.
The article continues at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/27/mysql_slowing_down/