Michael Widenius

The free database behind the early web. Widenius, a Finnish programmer known as Monty, wrote most of MySQL's early code, and in 1995 co-founded MySQL AB in Sweden with David Axmark and Allan Larsson, offering the database free under an open-source licence and selling commercial licences and support. As the M in the LAMP stack, it powered countless websites. After Oracle acquired it through Sun, he forked it as MariaDB in 2009.