MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation).[8] In 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun, Widenius forked the open-source MySQL project to create MariaDB.[9] MySQL has stand-alone clients that allow users to interact directly with a MySQL database using SQL, but more often, MySQL is used with other programs to implement applications that need relational database capability. MySQL is a component of the LAMP web application software stack (and others), which is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python. MySQL is used by many database-driven web applications, including Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and WordPress.[10] MySQL is also used by many popular websites, including Facebook,[11][12] Flickr,[13] MediaWiki,[14] Twitter,[15] and YouTube.[16]