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K1 Buys MariaDB
- gigatexal 2y agoOnly question is will it remain open source and free.
- evanelias 2y agoMariaDB Server is GPL and must always remain GPL, as it's a fork of MySQL which was also GPL. Also the MariaDB Foundation is separate from the commercial/enterprise entity MariaDB plc. This article is about the latter being taken private.
- steve918 2y agoThis code base has been sold like 3x now and is still around.
- kijin 2y agoIf anything, that looks like solid evidence of the resiliency of GPL.
- gigatexal 2y agoThank you all for assuaging my fears. Yay for the GPL.
- evanelias 2y agoEhh, not exactly, personally I wouldn't agree that the first half of that statement is correct. I think it's important to stress that this article (press release, really) is about MariaDB plc being sold. That was the previously-publicly-traded commercial entity which develops MariaDB Enterprise and other paid solutions. But the MariaDB Community Server code base is maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, which is totally separate. (That said, MariaDB plc is the largest outside code contributor to MariaDB Community Server as well; but they're technically not the maintainers of it.) It's also important to understand that MariaDB and MySQL have diverged in functionality over the years, and MySQL is still actively developed by Oracle, who have consistently put some serious engineering effort into it. Many folks on HN seem to think that MySQL died and MariaDB replaced it, as some sort of successor across a linear history; that's not accurate and in reality MySQL is extremely widely used.
- stephenr 2y agoAlso worth noting that Oracle makes their sql proxy (mysql router) available under gpl too. MariaDB's sql proxy was GPL but went BSL at v2.0 (around 2016 iirc).
- asmnzxklopqw 2y agoHaha, how many times can one sell mysql?
- miohtama 2y agoAt least twice.
- homarp 2y agoMonty needs a new kid for his next db https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
- vitus 2y agoI did not realize MySQL was also named after one of his kids.
- JensRantil 2y agoYeah, "My" is actually pronounced wrong by 99% of all MySQL users.
- leetrout 2y agoSure, but > The official way to pronounce “MySQL” is “My Ess Que Ell” (not “my sequel”), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as “my sequel” or in some other localized way. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/what-is-mysql.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/what-is-mysql.html
- npstr 2y agoThe SQL part as well, it should be pronounced "squeal".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoWhat's the correct way to pronounce it?
- nemoniac 2y agoRoughly rhymes with the "vu" in "Déjà vu"
- gosukiwi 2y ago
- miohtama 2y agoIt must be tough for the business, as more and more web development has fallen in love with PostgreSQL. While the support business for PostgreSQL exists, I am not sure if they can get similar profit margins / earning multipliers as early 2000 software businesses, even open source ones.
- mathnode 2y ago[flagged]
- miohtama 2y agoMaybe you have misconception about the scalability of PostgreSQL. > According to Instagram representatives, the number of platform users exceeded 2 billion last year. This is quarter of all humanity. This mass of people publishes nearly 50 million photos a day. Football star Cristiano Ronaldo has over 600 million followers; singer Ariana Grande has over 380 million. Talk about huge databases! > Instagram uses many RDBMSs, but PostgreSQL and Cassandra were chosen for the main tasks. The goal was to reduce delay and ensure users can easily and comfortably use the application. PostgreSQL is also the most popular database in StackOverflow surveys.
- mathnode 2y ago"popular with developers" is not the same as actually used in real world scenarios. Show me a real world example of pgsql failover and re-mastering that does not involve a restore and not editing configs. How basic? Not even sybase ASE server needs that. Ingres made change in the 80's, everyone else copied it and built on it. Except postgres. It's the Minix of databases. Show me any proof, that anything of scale is happening in postgresql. All that big facebook and apple data is happening in cassandra (and foundationdb for apple). Netflix has the same pattern, MySQL and Cassandra. Like the days of yore of keeping big data in file systems or tapes and blob indexes in a RDBMS.
- evanelias 2y ago> All that big facebook and apple data is happening in cassandra (and foundationdb for apple) Not sure about Instagram, but I can tell you with complete confidence that Facebook proper (meaning specifically Facebook, not the rest of Meta) moved away from Cassandra well over a decade ago. They originally used Cassandra for FB messages / Messenger, but soon migrated to HBase and then over to MySQL / MyRocks.
- lfmunoz4 2y agoWhat are some reasons to use MariaDB over PostgreSQL?
- refset 2y agoNative bitemporal tables: https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/temporal-tables-part-5/ https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/temporal-tables-part-5/
- floating-io 2y agoMy reason has been relative simplicity. PostgreSQL comes off as much more complex (though whether that is actually true is probably dependent on what you're doing with it). I'm also not working with super-high-performance production-critical loads, though, so grain of salt and all that.
- ReptileMan 2y agoMysql is mercurial, Postgres is git. With mysql everything comes somewhat intuitive. Postgres is antiintutive in a lot of places. Probably the people that created it didn't realize that the complexity of Oracle was not needed but was a job program for expensive consultants /s
- aguaviva 2y agoMy own take: "With MySQL everything seems somewhat more intuitive at first, until it doesn't. Postgres seems antiintutive in some ways at first, until it isn't."
- Bjartr 2y agoFor a legacy system originally built on MySQL back before Postgres was so strong.
- garciasn 2y agoThey’re both great systems but there are a few differences primarily in small ways for most applications: Maria supports partitioning, Postgres (as of my last knowledge) does not. Unstructured data is more flexible in Maria natively, but Postgres can support it in a variety of ways. You can find lists and lists of head to head comparisons out there which will highlight all of the niche differences that each brings over the other. Ultimately either will work just fine for 99% of use cases.
- floating-io 2y agoFor those who are using MariaDB in a business context: does this make you more or less likely to choose it for your next project? I don't know anything about K1, so all I have is confusion (and a sudden urge to switch entirely to postgres).
- mathnode 2y agoFrom my POV, it's a supplier that is no longer beholden to shareholders demands for profit. A platform and service that can operate using customer sourced revenue and respond to market demand without a profit driven board is a big win for everyone while funding development and maintenance of a great open source project.
- CyanLite2 2y agoI think that’s exactly the wrong impression I get. Private equity is going to cause them to quickly get to better profitability through price increases, layoffs, and reduced R&D.
- justinclift 2y ago> it's a supplier that is no longer beholden to shareholders demands for profit. That doesn't seem correct. It's now owned by a single shareholder, that's literally a financial organisation of the kind likely to turn the screws until the last drop of blood is gone.
- stackskipton 2y agoI’d say less. This acquisition screams that some MBA looked at their financials, saw money left on table, likely by not completely screwing over customers, and said, let’s do this! Think Broadcom/VMware on smaller scale. You don’t put yourself in debt and replace the CEO unless you see some value not currently being realized. They might even try license shenanigans but with GPLv2, not sure what they can do.
- stephenr 2y agoIt's a weird scenario where a bunch of people bemoaned Oracle owning MySQL (hence MariaDB exists), and yet Oracle have maintained and allowed MySQL to see huge improvements, and they include their sql proxy under GPL as well. As a weird twist of coincidence and irony, MariaDB's sql proxy is BSL only. I don't think either license is a reason to use/not use the respective DB system (HAproxy exists) but it's always funny to me how the "we must keep it open" group did exactly what they accused Oracle of planning to do.
- fsckboy 2y agoi'm predicting K1 flips MariaDB to Oracle as soon as the dust settles
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoInteresting thought. I wonder if someone did analyses on how long K1 tends to keep their companies before exist, and what is typical exit path - sell to strategic (Oracle? IBM?) sell to some other PE or take public
- PeterZaitsev 2y agoWould be very interesting to hear about plans of MariaDB PLC and New CEO - what are they going to do differently and if that strategy makes sense. MariaDB does not need to win against MySQL, it really needs to win against PostgreSQL