Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical, said on Google+ that Ubuntu 14.04 would include MySQL 5.6. I asked Shuttleworth why he wasn’t using such MySQL forks as MariaDB. Shuttleworth answered, “We’ll be happy to include solid code from MySQL forks as they mature. Percona, SkySQL, MariaDB are all interesting and would be nice to make easily available.”
One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle’s MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle’s Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle’s neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, “We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux.”