If MariaDB hadn't been there, and as competitive as it was, I doubt Oracle would have played so nicely with MySQL.
Oracle has one goal, and that is to make money. They've realised due to the competitive pressure in this case that they can't abandon the community and go straight into value extraction mode.
InnoDB was owned by Oracle since 2005. I don't recall seeing any complaints about that at the time. In 2010, when Oracle bought Sun, then there were complaints from the MySQL team. But not complaints when Sun bought MySQL. Honestly, most people had been using InnoDB as their main MySQL engine for the previous 5 years already but there was no whinging from the MySQL team about that (that I recall).
It's all pretty arbitrary in my opinion -- if Monty and company hadn't whined so much when Oracle bought Sun, I doubt there would have been a fork.
Anyway... it never bothered me one way or the other.
Oracle has one goal, and that is to make money. They've realised due to the competitive pressure in this case that they can't abandon the community and go straight into value extraction mode.