Perl programmer Tim Bunce (DBI/DBD) has been sending mass emails to support this cause, and I didn't understand it either. There's some mumbling about how you can't really fork mysql but no clear explanation as to why. GPL is GPL, and the whole codebase is under GPL. You can do what you want. If they need to come up with a new name, because Oracle starts asserting a trademark issue, so be it. Mandriva survives, doesn't it? I had to think for a second to remember that it used to be called Mandrake.
MySQL does the job pretty well for applications in which stored procedures and other advanced features are not needed. It is really fast and very effective at doing what is absolutely needed: INSERTS, UPDATES, and SELECTS. I don't think it is "awful" or ready to die.
Quality rarely drives market share in software. In this case I blame nearly all of the 5.2 million PHP and MySQL tutorials out there for exemplifying shoddy practices that inevitably lead to quietly truncated fields, phantom reads, and SQL injection attacks.
