MySQL vs MariaDB

[Nathan England]

It's going to happen, and I expect sooner than later, that many web hosts are 
going to become irritated with Oracle and switch to something other than 
MySQL. Are any of you currently using MariaDB instead? How does it compare, 
how would you rate it, any gotchas? What are your thoughts?

I personally don't have any interest in switching to PostGreSQL or anything 
else, but MariaDB is very interesting. I guess there are a couple of MySQL 
forks as well, and I'd like information about those also, but primarily 
MariaDB...

Nathan