Mariadb.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org

https://medium.com/@imashadowphantom/mariadb-com-is-dead-long-live-mariadb-org-b8a0ca50a637

by edent • 3 years ago

236 100 3 years ago

ahofmann• 3 years ago

Oof. What does this mean for us people using mariadb? Is there a big company that uses mariadb enough, that the development of the db is secured?

davidmichael• 3 years ago

There are a number of large companies sponsoring MariaDB.org development. I don't think there is any concern about its development going forward at this point.

https://mariadb.org/donate/#corporate-sponsorships

felixgallo2• 3 years ago

Shades of Basho (rip). One wonders if there is a curse on open source database companies. Maybe we could call it Data Gravity?

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

Postgres seems to be managing it pretty well.

The curse is on companies that decide to completely own some popular open source program. If you are happy to just be successful together with other people, you'll be fine.

ilyt2• 3 years ago

??? They were never even a popular database in the first place

assface• 3 years ago

Shades of Basho

Can you please explain? They just ran out of money. They never did a SPAC.

felixgallo2• 3 years ago

https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/09/basho_damages_20m_mis...

sbuttgereit• 3 years ago

I dunno... EnterpriseDB seems to be around year after year without too much drama.

https://www.enterprisedb.com/

bratao• 3 years ago

I´m very sad that MariaDB is in this state. MySQL it still a very powerful database. For someone looking for alternatives, I recommend the Percona Distribution of MySQL. https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-serv...

daneel_w• 3 years ago

It's the commercial limb that has developed gangrene, not the software, not its founder, nor the developers. The software is (so far) not in any immediate danger.

stefanos82• 3 years ago

People, relax please!

This is the company we are talking about, not the FOSS-ed version.

If Microsoft has become a Platinum Sponsor for Azure support, you have nothing to worry about; the MySQL team that moved to MariaDB along with Monty will offer their support for you.

See the video by Monty near the end of https://mariadb.org/donate/

avg_dev• 3 years ago

This entire article was written for one group of people.
If you are employed at MariaDB, you absolutely need to be scheduling interviews with other companies.

shapefrog• 3 years ago

the SPAC entity

I stopped reading right there - MariaDB (corp) went public via a SPAC in Dec 2022. Hopefully this is nature healing itself and the Corp entity goes to the wall and the Open Source foundation sheds the parasite.

I also hope all the grifters involved wind up broke and homeless.

lbhdc• 3 years ago

I was surprised when I saw them go public the other day. It wasn't really clear to me what their business plan was. At the time, I was still under the impression they had a bunch of spac money, but I had a hard time seeing a path for them to keep those coffers full. This seems like a mess.

wholinator2• 3 years ago

I guess i don't fully understand the distinction. So the company is going down, but the open source org is still alive. Did the company do most of the development? If they did was that development available to people using it 'for free'? Why was there a company in the first place, you'd think it would be hard to make money betting on a single open source database.

My only interaction with MariaDB was picking it from a list of possible RDS images because the description basically said, "MySQL but better". Since i was paying AWS to run that service, was there money going to the MariaDB corporation? Or was AWS using the free open source one and pocketing the cash. I'm definitely out of my depth here

that_guy_iain• 3 years ago

I think MariaDB the company did the support contracts, probably funded some development, and had some commerical products. They had some of their own products because they created the Business Source License[1] where code becomes open-source after three years.

[1] https://mariadb.com/bsl11/

adduc• 3 years ago

MariaDB Plc. appears to be the top contributor to MariaDB's codebase (81.9% of commits since the beginning of 2020)[0].

[0] https://mariadb.org/mariadb-contribution-statistics-march-20...

tomxor• 3 years ago

MariaDB Plc. appears to be the top contributor to MariaDB's codebase (81.9% of commits since the beginning of 2020)[0].

For context MariaDB existed before 2020, Before the Plc, since 2009, and will continue to exist after.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

Does the original creator have a third kid to name the next fork after?

wayne• 3 years ago

You mean 4? The second kid's name was used for MaxDB, which is used in the SAP world. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius

alienzx4• 3 years ago

aws doesnt pay them shit

eis• 3 years ago

This is the second time that Monty left a company that he had no control over even though it was his software "baby" that the company was selling. At least the first time he made some good money. But I'm not sure if that is the case this time.

Third time's the charm? Monty you should retain control over the companies that you want to sell your product under. If you don't control over 50% then it's not "your company" anymore.

bombcar• 3 years ago

Maybe he has enough money to be comfortable and should just work on a non-profit doing database things.

robocat• 3 years ago

If you don't control over 50%

Founders will virtually always lose control once they hop on the investor conveyor belt. It can happen as soon as Round A e.g. VC wants 25% with 10% option pool and seed investors owns 15% (say due to carry along provisions) - et voila - founder diluted to 50%! It often is inevitable as soon as a founder takes seed money because (a) if you must take seed you probably need future cash for competitive growth, and (b) seed investors define expectation of future VC rounds (e.g. YC demo day). The well known exceptions where founders retained control are outliers.

Furthermore, founders are third class because investors get first class preferential shares. Preferential shares have a variety of powerful benefits over common shares - including rights to oust the founders (under conditions that will usually occur: VCs take advantage of the natural optimism of founders).

Even worse: the game is systematically rigged against founders, because VCs are “the house” and have been setting up the rules while playing multiple games for decades, but it is usually a founders first game. Bacon and egg breakfast: where the founders are the fully committed pigs providing the bacon, but the investors are chickens providing the eggs. 10 years of life is one hock. If a founder wins a game and want to play again, then a founder often starts their own casino by doing seed rounds. Sometimes a successful founder can afford to start a new business without using VC investment (self-invests).

VC capital can be a drug worth taking if you fully manage your risks. Just beware that the industry rule-of-thumb is that 90% of the time a founder has an expected payout of approximately $0.

The YCombinator casino is a bit of an exception because they better understand how much a founder is worth so they help founders play games with other casinos. But you still can’t argue that your sweat equity should be equally worth dollars invested: a software developer taking a $100k paycut for the first year of a startup should receive $100k of preferential shares - but I have never heard of that happening. Subtle game play.

PeterZaitsev• 3 years ago

After leaving Sun Monty in fact started Monty Programming AB - company he started based on "Hacking Business Models" https://hbm.mariadb.org/

It was really company "ran by engineers" focused on developers. Later though he merged with "SkySQL" and the company became MariaDB Corporation

mardifoufs• 3 years ago

I wonder if some distro repos will stop installing mariadb instead of mysql whenever you try to install mysql. Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development. (MariaDB.org seems to be still active, but there is now much more uncertainty (imo) compared to the mysql project)

ilyt2• 3 years ago

It's literally "lesser evil", as MySQL is owned by Oracle now.

apocalyptic0n3• 3 years ago

At a glance, it seems like the open source MariaDB is just fine. It's the commercial company that is dead/dying. This may affect future development on the OSS side, but for now it seems like there's no immediate danger.

As for why it's included over MySQL, it's undoubtedly the fact that MySQL has been owned by Oracle since 2010. Oracle has not been the most friendly to OSS communities in the past.

usrusr• 3 years ago

You were probably talking only about the OSS side of that particular RDBMS, but I believe that effect on OSS in general might actually be even more interesting: taking a few years of salaries from investors and then pack up when tensions over postponing profitability reach uncomfortable levels? At some point capital will start refusing to play that game.

This is supposed to be about "racism, sexism" and stuff like that, but I don't necessarily see any contradiction. Because it's not unheard of that in troubled companies, questionable people rise to or stay in power that would not stand a chance in a more healthy environment where better candidates don't run away. Selection for the kind of person who'd rather be captain on a sinking wreck than some lower officer on a well run boat and I'd be surprised if there wasn't considerable correlation between those and the scandal that's supposedly the root cause here.

flas9sd2• 3 years ago

as a database engines fan, I am glad for mariadb to have been the replacement in many distros. This way it got traction and mariadb did interesting things the last few years. Oracle mysql put out interesting releases with v8 again too. While I got hit by some bugs in mariadb, I did also benefit. As long as core developers aren't stranded or go outside sql/databases I don't think there is a technical loss.

dspillett• 3 years ago

Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

It never stopped, but it did seem to stagnate a fair bit for a while meaning that MariaDB trumped it on some features & fixes. For instance CTE support arrived in stable releases about a year earlier. That of course may not be the case any more.

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

Oracle seems to do large feature drops every few years, while MariaDB has been shipping features incrementally every 6 months or so. The first couple of versions were the exception: they pulled an enormous amount of functionality from other forks, many of which have since been removed (things like the TokuDB storage engine). Left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth (how can you depend on a database that shoves 50 features in, and then removes 20 of them during the next few years).

We have low visibility into MySQL development process (is the bug tracker still closed? I am not sure), so when they shipped 8.0 in 2018 it was quite a surprise. They fixed a number of outstanding issues, including many extremely bad defaults (like using proper Unicode by default). Some things added in 8.0 (like atomic DDL) are still not available in MariaDB. Oracle being Oracle, there haven't been any major releases since.

cesarb• 3 years ago

Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

It makes sense if the distribution no longer includes mysql, and the mysql the distribution included previously was from before the fork: users who already had mysql installed would be automatically migrated to a compatible replacement. It's the same thing which happened with openoffice and libreoffice.

rubinlinux• 3 years ago

Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.

What actually happened is more like they changed their name, and sold the old name to Oracle. Oracle then forked and carried on developing a new product under the old name, while the original team carried on developing the old product under the new name (mariadb).

That is why distros did what they did.

jzb• 3 years ago

MySQL sold to Sun in 2008, which was then gobbled up by Oracle in 2009.

MariaDB is the fork, technically speaking. The distro switch took some time, probably in part because they wanted to wait and see if MariaDB would be suitable / sustainable.

Fedora and openSUSE switched to MariaDB in 2013, in part due to Oracle's license changes and changes to info published in CVEs and because they were considered easier to work with. (See: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/201...)

fortran77• 3 years ago

What was the racism, sexism, and abuse at "MariaDB the Company"? A search yields no drama.

justin_oaks• 3 years ago

Have you tried asking ChatGPT? I'm sure it can come up with something.

This is a reference to another HN item on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468540

npteljes2• 3 years ago

This is yet another case of American corporatism failing the open source world.

I believe that simply "This is yet another case of American corporatism failing", full stop. It's a loophole in the system.

It's a good thing that MariaDB is open source, so that a failure like this can't bring the product down.

hodgesrm• 3 years ago

Could you be more specific about how American corporatism is failing open source in this case? MariaDB PLC is not profitable and most investors give it low chances of getting there. It's currently trading at 25% of the IPO price which was already 40% below the initial opening. [0, 1] (I hope I'm reading the numbers correctly.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mariadb-announces-first-quart...

npteljes2• 3 years ago

I specifically wanted to say that American corporatism failing, and open source are not related, despite the article saying so. Open source is just fine, regardless of these things happening - even the MariaDB project will survive, I believe. In my eye, the ones most hurt are the employees, and the people who wanted the project to be successful, including Monty.

warent• 3 years ago

Good grief I don't know what to make of this, but it does make me feel glad that I've chosen to specialize in Postgres

kramerger• 3 years ago

This Michael Howard guy sounds like a greate dude...

What did he do before joining and crashing mariadb?

NelsonMinar2• 3 years ago

His LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-howard-2b7b273/

He joined MariaDB 7 years ago, in 2015. Before then he hasC9 (A SaaS company), Greenplum, EMC, 10 jobs in total. In the late 90s he lists 4 years as "VP of data warehousing and integration technologies" at Oracle.

alfor• 3 years ago

In 2023 what is the advantage of mariaDB/mysql vs Postgres?

mrunkel• 3 years ago

Whichever one you know is the one for you.

MangoCoffee• 3 years ago

its probably the install base. if you look at share webhosting, most if not all offer MySql.

flas9sd2• 3 years ago

there are less dimensions in user/access management to grok, no role privilege inheritance to think of. The public schema in psql has a surprise for unsuspecting mysql converts. Easier connection model. No vacuuming. Maxscale (by mariadb) is a good addition.

Now you didn't ask for Postgres advantages but I know a lot too, I like the choice and competition.

bojanz• 3 years ago

Out of the box multi-master replication is a pretty big one.

Veen• 3 years ago

This article twice makes accusations of "racism, sexism, and abuse" without backing it up with facts. Is there any more information about it in the public sphere? Or is it just: "These things are bad and MariaDB is bad, so we'll say they did these things".

It certainly seems like the company is going down the toilet, but I'd be dubious about the motivations of an anonymous rant on Medium about a publicly traded company.

jjulius• 3 years ago

The only article referencing those claims that I could find when Googling just now was this very article. Beyond that, there is a Glassdoor page with negative reviews that suggest the same.

tablespoon3• 3 years ago

The only article referencing those claims that I could find when Googling just now was this very article. Beyond that, there is a Glassdoor page with negative reviews that suggest the same.

I'm thinking those accusations are probably just slurs by someone with a grudge.

I'm running into all kinds of paywalls with Glassdoor and I don't want to register, but google searches make it look like pretty much every company under the sun has a Glassdoor review complaining of racism, sexism, etc. For instance this one claims that Apple is homophobic, racist, sexist, and "very Trumpian":

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Apple-RVW1...

rwalle• 3 years ago

Yeah, I was so turned off by this that I did not go much further beyond the first paragraph. I mean, is this a rant or a genuine effort to write a story? Why should I bother to read an article that makes such strong accusations without providing concrete evidence, and is the rest of the article is also written in the same fashion?

hintymad2• 3 years ago

"racism, sexism, and abuse" without backing it up with facts.

Yeah, I was turned off by this too. Unfortunately this is the psyche of the western world. You disagree with me? You're racist. You think bias in an ML model comes from bias in data. You're a bigot. Such accusation works and LeCun apologizes.

creatonez2• 3 years ago

This is not "the psyche of the western world", this is a ridiculous caricature you came up with.

KyeRussell• 3 years ago

You coming here to grind your personal axe makes you at least as bad as the author of this article.

Even your concrete example is ridiculous. “ML bias tends to come from biased training data” is…THE widely accepted viewpoint. The whole CONVERSATION around ML bias, from academia to MSM shovelware articles, is framed this way: that ML is not an escape hatch from pre-existing biases.

As someone that definitely considers themselves an SJW (to use the lingo that I bet that you use), and that runs in these circles, the only time I see the viewpoint that you’re arguing against is in the form of strawmen posed by stunted kids on 4chan complaining about “pronouns” or something.

creatonez2• 3 years ago

According to the thread on /r/mysql, the author used to work there. So there is some credibility to the claims.

geenat• 3 years ago

Bit of a nail in the coffin for me as of late.

* No async drivers.

* Total freezeup bug that only appears when MariaDB is under high load, since mid-2021 (10.6), not yet addressed.

* Postgres 15 outperforming MariaDB in both my own SELECT and INSERT benchmarks. Up to double performance for INSERT.

* Less and less compatibility with MySQL. Vitess dropping MariaDB.

* Postgres has a lighter setup, super fast compile in 2023. Standalone / portable Postgres is amazing: https://gist.github.com/gnat/cfe3754c3dc817c7fb8b2225ef4db62...

I do enjoy the MariaDB / MySQL tooling and syntax way more as a developer, and MaxScale etc. seems good, but there's only so much BS i'm willing to deal with when Postgres exists.

codr7• 3 years ago

Postgres was the first relational database I came into contact with, Interbase the second and Oracle the third.

Lately I've been writing a REST back end on top of MariaDB at work, and I swear it's going to drive me insane with its arbitrary limitations.

At least SQLite offers something in return that Postgres can't do.

5e92cb50239222b2• 3 years ago

At least SQLite offers something in return that Postgres can't do.

If you're going to throw allegations around, at least get your facts straight. MariaDB and MySQL support complex replication topologies out of the box, including multi-master. Yes, it does come in useful if implemented correctly: we built a business application for a particular setup with many branches around the country, many of which have very unreliable network and must be able to continue working with a local database when that network is not available. It has been running for 4-5 years without issues.

They're also much easier to support: for example, upgrades are handled automatically — no need to dump and restore or resort to weird tricks; you can easily upgrade through ten major versions just by installing the latest version and restarting the daemon.

Some other features off the top of my mind: compression (zlib, lz4, lzo, zstd), versioned tables (an absolute life-saver if you need audit).

TylerE• 3 years ago

If you think that's bad, you weren't around for the MYiASM (I think it was.. days).

Yeah, for years, MySQL shipped with a default storage format that didn't enforce constraints.

zinclozenge• 3 years ago

What kind of tooling does MariaDB/MySQL have that you miss when using Postgres? I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the ecosystem as I am with Postgres.

JeremyNT• 3 years ago

I'm curious too, but my suspicion is that it's "the devil you know" at play here.

If you work with a tech for long enough you get the tooling "figured out" and things can feel like second nature. Maybe some alternative has equally "good" tooling (for however you define "good") but it may have slightly different quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. The fact that you have to figure that stuff out is itself a negative.

mschuster915• 3 years ago

What kind of tooling does MariaDB/MySQL have that you miss when using Postgres?

Easy upgrades? With MySQL it has never been more involved than running apt-get dist-upgrade/docker rm mysql && docker run mysql/kubectl deploy, depending on the stack. Downtimes of less than two minutes.

In contrast, PostgreSQL is such a hassle to upgrade that I only do it when forced to by an application dropping support for the current major version.

nophunphil• 3 years ago

Not tooling, but the big one for me is the ability to reorder columns via ALTER statements.

jcadam• 3 years ago

There are still plenty of devs who just spin up mysql (rather than mariadb) without thinking about it when starting a new project. Because that's what they always do.

zerocrates• 3 years ago

Why shouldn't they? MySQL 8 is pretty good.

djha-skin2• 3 years ago

A lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt here. Of course the banks backing out along with the founder is a bad sign. However, quoting "they may expire worthless" from an SEC filing and citing that as "evidence" is weak; SEC filings are full of what-if scenarios. From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway for 100 people, even if it is a bit stiff for California. I'm not saying it won't shut down, but some of the specific arguments about why its demise is coming didn't land with me.

zaidf• 3 years ago

From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway for 100 people

LinkedIn shows ~350 employees with about half of them in the US. $4.8 million is far from plenty to pay 300+ employees...not counting lawyers.

tmpz222• 3 years ago

From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway for 100 people,

4.800.000 / 100 = $48,000 per person. For one year.

Not counting all other business expenses like servers. Laptops. Slack. Zoom.

djha-skin2• 3 years ago

These numbers assume no revenue however.

NelsonMinar2• 3 years ago

Another SPAC story.

ThinkBeat• 3 years ago

As unwelcome as I find it, I guess this will cause people to switch to Oracle MySQL is they need full $$$$ support for their databases.

fmajid• 3 years ago

Could Percona be a white knight for MariaDB (the project, not the company)? Ownership by Oracle is an immediate deal-breaker for me.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

I don't wanna get involved in the politics of it all, and yes I love postgres too, I just want to say that Monty is a pretty cool founder.

Several times I've come into their irc channel on libera and asked some dumb question and Monty himself answers me. How many other projects that have lived through an Oracle acquisition can you say that about?

habibur• 3 years ago

RIP : MySQL of the 90s that made the dynamic web possible.

There were two options then. mSQL where you couldn't join between two tables. And Postgress95 which crashed sometimes as soon as a client connected.

MySQL had been a breath of fresh air.

joeatwork• 3 years ago

Indeed - MySQL was fast, freely available, lightweight, and “good enough” (and continually getting better) in an era when the commercial competitors were ultraheavy, evil or broken (and often all three). Pour one out for a real one.

kerblang• 3 years ago

Well, I was wondering: Can one guy really IPO the same product twice? It was quite a clever stunt quitting Oracle, snagging IP on the way out, and just rinse/repeat to another $billion+ but it seemed to good to be true. I guess it was.

(I am a MariaDB user, btw, so... hoping that it doesn't go completely in the toilet.)

ergonaught• 3 years ago

We didn't IPO MySQL, we were acquired by Sun. We were on track for IPO, yes, but there were too many acquisition offers to bother.

Monty didn't "snag IP" or perform a "clever stunt". He forked a GPL codebase the same as anyone else can do. His goal was not to do another IPO.

I get that talking about things you don't actually understand is perfectly human, but Monty's about 99% great guy pretty much all the time. If you want to snipe, take aim at the one thing he actually did wrong, instead of the things other people did wrong with his babies.

alienzx4• 3 years ago

one thing he did wrong like losing his company multiple times? sounds like hes bad at business

pachico• 3 years ago

I have plans to migrate all our MariaDB RDS instances to MySQL. AWS is heavily investing in MySQL (Aurora, even Serverless) while for MariaDB there is hardly any news.

I'm sad, every time I do benchmarks for specific use cases, MariaDB turns out to have better performance but we do need to think about sustainability.

Sooner or later, we will say good bye to it.

bastardoperator• 3 years ago

I've always gravitated towards MySQL because I had the most experience with. I recently started work with Supabase and Postgres, I don't think I'll ever look back.

jjluoma• 3 years ago

I would like to know more about those insurances, have they bought new ones? If so, are those really going to cover anything at all they would like to be covered? If there has been negligence, breach of duty or breach of trust in the past, why would a new insurance cover those?

nickstinemates• 3 years ago

Working with Monty was the best part of working at MariaDB. Hope he is doing well.

BonoboIO• 3 years ago

Should i short the stock?

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

If you have to ask, the answer is 'yes'.

alienzx4• 3 years ago

Whoever wrote this is an anonymous coward that was harassing employees from fake addresses and actively making up lies to sabotage the company for months. The person even made fake glassdoor reviews. It’s all half truths and bullshit. Is MariaDB perfect? Probably not, but they’re not about to go under. I mean the business writes all the code and keeps the foundation alive.

I just checked with some people I know over there and they can still slack Monty. He is still in their hr thing. Also, the old CFO wasn’t fired, he had to leave for some reason but still worked there for months after. They have a new CFO already. https://mariadb.com/newsroom/press-releases/mariadb-names-co...

Lawsuits are usually public and you can google it. There’s no crazy lawsuits like the person says. It’s just lies.

My wall street buddy told me the insurance stuff is standard practice when a company goes public. I think every public company has this. All the stuff about business risk is like standard boilerplate stuff. Every company is at risk if they don’t make profit or meet targets. Like wtf?

Even the stock price stuff - Look at the volumes, someone is screwing with them. Employees can’t sell yet anyway.

There’s accusations of "racism, sexism, and abuse" but like their youtube has women and a guy with a turban and a bunch of other races. There’s no lawsuits I could find either.

It’s like all taken out of context from SEC filings to make some sort of bullshit story.

Mariadb.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org

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