Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own

Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.