Percona is no more a fork than Webscale is, it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Oracle MySQL and it tracks releases pretty closely. MariaDB was suppo

Percona is no more a fork than Webscale is, it's supposed to be a drop-in replacement for Oracle MySQL and it tracks releases pretty closely. MariaDB was supposed to be a drop-in replacement, but they always had much grander designs than Percona or Webscale do, so they found it was no longer in their interests to track upstream so closely. So after 5.5, MariaDB was going to jump straight to version 10.0. 5.5 is still the last stable release of MariaDB, though, even though Oracle MySQL hit 5.6 over a year ago. I think "terrible steward" is way off base. 5.5 and 5.6 have both been good releases with some pretty significant improvements for real users, and there's even more stuff coming in 5.7. My general impression is that MariaDB doesn't have the resources to keep up with what Oracle is doing technically, and I'm betting that technical merits will win out.