Hah, so MariaDB was created because the creator of MySQL got pissed about the acquisition by Sun/Oracle, and now MariaDB might be acquired as well? Making bank while forking their project over and over isn't a bad way to make a living it seems.
MariaDB already had its exit last December. It went public via a SPAC deal.
Like most SPACs, the stock hasn't performed well. Its market cap is now around $30 million, which is substantially less than it raised in venture funding.
If they want to remain a public company, they'll need to do a reverse-split soon to get the stock price above $1/share, otherwise they'll be de-listed.
Receiving an unsolicited offer compels them to publish this notice, and by their declaration they were not seeking that offer (“unsolicited”).
Technically, I think anyone can make an offer on any company operating in their legal jurisdiction, and that would compel the company receiving the offer to publish an equivalent press release.
I don’t blame them for having nothing to add at this time other than “here is the legally required declaration, please wait”. Even a flat refusal takes time to prepare, in order to meet all the necessary legal forms.
(This is not legal advice, please consult a legal professional regarding the validity of these statements in your jurisdiction(s), etc.)
The big difference here is that Runa Capital is a venture capital firm, and they already invested in MariaDB 8 years ago. To be honest I don't really understand how this acquisition makes sense in that context.
It's trading at a market cap of around $31 million, which is below even its revenue. Could make sense to buy it, improve operating metrics, and then flip it. (Or buy it, make it profitable, and earn a return that way.)
As a long term MySQL user I think getting acquired by Oracle pretty good for the product. The old, hard issues that MySQL never had the engineering to tackle themselves finally got resolved.
I am so confused, for the lay person - can someone explain how does something with a copy-left license the GPL end up in this situation of being "acquired"? We can just fork it right?
I have lately been wondering if culture has forgotten how to run any organisation apart from a for profit corporation or a KPI driven NGO. E.g. an association, a co-operative etc. These all require collaboration and entrepreneurship and innovation without it being a competition via KPI or everything justified by the dollar (as is often the case sometimes even in charities)
GPL is what allowed Monty to fork after selling the MySQL trademark and copyright to Oracle. So Monty lost the ability to dual license, yet gained much money. Arguably with GPL2 he could even fork with proprietary plugins created later. Or he may have negotiated a backroom deal with Oracle to keep some relicensing rights.
It's a great choice for higher budget applications too. At my job (public tech company, former startup), we use Postgres as our source of truth for just about everything that should go in an OLTP database (e.g. not analytics). I don't think there's another database product that would work as well for us as Postgres.
I wonder where MariaDB and MySQL will be in like 5-10 years. The whole SPAC thing was weird to hear about and now talk of possible acquisition.
I picked MariaDB for a freelance project recently, because it seems to work well with everything I self-host: Matomo Analytics, Apache Skywalking APM, BookStack Wiki, Keycloak for user management and for any of the .NET (or Java) services that I'm going to be running.
Aside from DDL not being transactional (like in PostgreSQL) it's nice to use, has reasonable resource usage and in some ways is pretty simple (even things like having just databases instead of the database/schema separation, which I don't necessarily need). Also, tooling like MySQL Workbench is great and stuff like Bitnami container images make spinning up new instances easy as can be.
It's good that for most basic use cases switching between MySQL and MariaDB is still doable, yet I still hope that both of the projects will stick around and will remain alive. Admittedly, you mostly hear about PostgreSQL on HN - though a litmus test like Google Trends or the DB-Engines Ranking site both suggest that it might be over represented here a bit (lots of cool features to talk about).
In Japan, "family" business owners often adopt adult children with the sole intention of them taking over the business without it leaving the "family".
That makes it a bit different than something like Mongo or Elasticsearch suddenly going with a business friendly license.
However, I still would wonder about the health of the committership community independent of this company. The job of a good foundation is to steward the project accordingly, and I wonder if MariaDB has been community or company governed?
Readit News
Like most SPACs, the stock hasn't performed well. Its market cap is now around $30 million, which is substantially less than it raised in venture funding.
If they want to remain a public company, they'll need to do a reverse-split soon to get the stock price above $1/share, otherwise they'll be de-listed.
Technically, I think anyone can make an offer on any company operating in their legal jurisdiction, and that would compel the company receiving the offer to publish an equivalent press release.
I don’t blame them for having nothing to add at this time other than “here is the legally required declaration, please wait”. Even a flat refusal takes time to prepare, in order to meet all the necessary legal forms.
(This is not legal advice, please consult a legal professional regarding the validity of these statements in your jurisdiction(s), etc.)
Oracle is not a tech company but a law firm that happens to have an engineering department.
Edit: my bad - Sun acquired it, not Oracle. Made me all sad for Suns demise again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3546
I have lately been wondering if culture has forgotten how to run any organisation apart from a for profit corporation or a KPI driven NGO. E.g. an association, a co-operative etc. These all require collaboration and entrepreneurship and innovation without it being a competition via KPI or everything justified by the dollar (as is often the case sometimes even in charities)
By all means, use what you’re comfortable with but not having stuff like transactional DDL feels backwards at this point.
Recently, the MariaDB board started to pursue additional private equity and a dilution of shares and this is part of Runa's response.
More information is available in this SEC filing : https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001929589/2335caa...
I picked MariaDB for a freelance project recently, because it seems to work well with everything I self-host: Matomo Analytics, Apache Skywalking APM, BookStack Wiki, Keycloak for user management and for any of the .NET (or Java) services that I'm going to be running.
Aside from DDL not being transactional (like in PostgreSQL) it's nice to use, has reasonable resource usage and in some ways is pretty simple (even things like having just databases instead of the database/schema separation, which I don't necessarily need). Also, tooling like MySQL Workbench is great and stuff like Bitnami container images make spinning up new instances easy as can be.
It's good that for most basic use cases switching between MySQL and MariaDB is still doable, yet I still hope that both of the projects will stick around and will remain alive. Admittedly, you mostly hear about PostgreSQL on HN - though a litmus test like Google Trends or the DB-Engines Ranking site both suggest that it might be over represented here a bit (lots of cool features to talk about).
Or has the acquirer somehow plugged Monty's favorite end-run around the acquisition game this time around?
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Source: Used to work there.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MRDB/
It's at penny-stock-level status with low volume.
https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-licenses/
That makes it a bit different than something like Mongo or Elasticsearch suddenly going with a business friendly license.
However, I still would wonder about the health of the committership community independent of this company. The job of a good foundation is to steward the project accordingly, and I wonder if MariaDB has been community or company governed?
The core database server will always be GPL though, especially as a fork of MySQL under the GPL.
MariaDB has a community and foundation which (afaik) is independent of the company.
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