11 ms·
Announcement regarding possible offer
- capableweb 3y agoHah, 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.
- dylan604 3y agogood thing the concept of non-compete windows are not part of FOSS
- solardev 3y agoIs it more that they're against acquisitions in general, or specifically an acquisition by Oracle, widely considered one of the eviler tech companies?
- actionfromafar 3y agoJust short of a hundred million dollars against it, in that case. :-) Edit: my bad - Sun acquired it, not Oracle. Made me all sad for Suns demise again.
- thayne 3y agoIIRC MariaDB was forked when Oracle acquired Sun not when Sun acquired MySQL.
- perbu 3y agoAs 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.
- rubiquity 3y agoFacebook and Alibaba deserve a lot of the credit for MySQL’s recent renaissance.
- b112 3y agoAnd a lot of mysql 5.6 was percona.
- asddubs 3y agowhat are those?
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y agoAtomic DDL (possible because of a complete rewrite of the underlying storage format), proper Unicode by default (did you know that utf8 in MySQL is not really utf8? hit up your favorite search engine for utf8mb3 vs utf8mb4), strict typing by default, plus a horde of new features many MySQL users have been waiting like CTEs and window functions. I too am a fan of what Oracle did for MySQL. There haven't been any major releases since 2018, though. Since their development process is closed, I am wondering when/if are we going to see MySQL 9 (if it's anything like 8, it's going to be huge). https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html MariaDB initially went through a process of adding absolutely everything they could into the database (e.g: many additional storage engines like Cassandra and TokuDB), most of which since have been removed. It felt less like it was driven by a strong engineering process, and more like let's throw everything and see what sticks (not much did).
- johannes1234321 3y ago> There haven't been any major releases since 2018, though. Since their development process is closed, I am wondering when/if are we going to see MySQL 9 (if it's anything like 8, it's going to be huge). MySQL since 8.0 is on a "rolling release" model, where features were shipped as part of 8.0 once they were finished instead of waiting for a 9.0 release. Thus 8.0 got quite a few improvements since 8.0.0. Recently they announced a new model where they split LTS style versions and increase version number, again, but features still appear as they are done and not for a big release: https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/post/introducing-mysql-innovation-and-longterm-support-lts-versions https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/post/introducing-mysql-innova...
- MenhirMike 3y ago> tech companies Oracle is not a tech company but a law firm that happens to have an engineering department.
- masklinn 3y agoThat's IBM. Oracle is a horrible person which happens to have a law firm.
- stock_toaster 3y agoOracle is a lawnmower with a law firm.
- b112 3y agoAnd a boat.
- happycube 3y agoAnd a Pacific island.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoMultiple boats, actually
- jorams 3y agoThe 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.
- runako 3y agoIt'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.)
- foota 3y agoI'm surprised the employees aren't making a buy out offer at this point. I'd love to own a reasonable fraction of the company I work for at that sort of price and would happily throw in some of my savings.
- nickstinemates 3y agoI think that if you're working for a company facing this sort of situation you wouldn't be as bullish. On top of that you'd have ownership through stock options which you didn't need to fork over savings for.
- swyx 3y agowell how many employees are left? just cause the company has revenues doesnt mean they have the wealth to buy their employer. ofc i'd absolutely love for this to happen. but also fair warning to any mariadb employees seriously considering this, figure out your renewal strategy first
- runako 3y agoThat makes sense, except the numbers may not match what people have/are willing to risk on their employer. $31m divided 500 ways (guessing @ staff size) is $62k each. That's a big bet in one place, and one that is likely to be out of reach for some staff.
- arp242 3y agoGives a new meaning to "fork over the cash" :-)
- evanelias 3y agoMariaDB 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.
- altairprime 3y agoReceiving 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.)
- Waterluvian 3y agoI would never fault anyone for cashing in and walking away when offered a life-changing sum. Life is too short.
- m463 3y agocontesting a will, divorce, police corruption, golden parachute, etc..
- derrida 3y agoI 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)
- paulryanrogers 3y agoGPL 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.
- ss48 3y agoThere was an anonymous post complaining about mariadb.com, the company a few months back. Never saw the claims anywhere else though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3546
- bawolff 3y agoWhat even is mariadb's business model?
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoBuild, sell, fork, repeat.
- nickstinemates 3y agoThey sell support to anyone with a MariaDB database that needs it. Many customers. Pretty cheap. Source: Used to work there.
- throwawayllaq 3y agoThe original way of making money with FOSS that folks like Hashicorp and InfluxData fail to understand while they push for unicorn status.
- pjmlp 3y agoExcept that model doesn't work for all software use cases, specially desktop software.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> The original way of making money with FOSS But at risk because a large company can offer the support as part of a larger offering. For example, if you were a large company on AWS or Azure, would you rather get your MySQL/MariaDB support through MariaDb or through Amazon/Microsoft?
- cultofmetatron 3y agoJust gets better every year without drama or fanfare. the postgres devs are really unsung heroes in the developer community.
- reocha 3y agoAgreed, Postgres is a no-brainier for most (either low capital startups or open source) db applications
- piperswe 3y agoIt'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.
- hardwaresofton 3y agoYou’d think, but people certainly still choose MySQL these days, and without a really serious reason to other than familiarity. By all means, use what you’re comfortable with but not having stuff like transactional DDL feels backwards at this point.
- throwawayllaq 3y agoThis is MariaDB, a MySQL fork.
- bitdivision 3y agoOP is mentioning Postgres as a counterpoint.
- swores 3y agoThe way they wrote a full sentence, that seems to be about Postgres, before introducing the word "Postgres" in the second sentence, does make it appear like they were confused and thought this thread was about that. (As the other logical reading would be that the first sentence is complimenting MariaDB before switching tack for sentence two. What they needed to do to not cause the confusion was to start with "Meanwhile, Postgres just gets...")
- jacquesm 3y agoSo, what's the next fork going to be called? Or has the acquirer somehow plugged Monty's favorite end-run around the acquisition game this time around?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asddubs 3y agowell, does monty have a third child? if not, there probably won't be a fork
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIn Japan, "family" business owners often adopt adult children with the sole intention of them taking over the business without it leaving the "family".
- petercooper 3y agoHe does (My, Maria and Max) but the name is already used for a database: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxDB
- dualboot 3y agoRuna is already a major stakeholder in MariaDB. 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-0001929589/2335caa4-579c-496d-84e4-009810c2b5f1.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001929589/2335caa...
- softwaredoug 3y agoMariaDB itself is GPL, no? https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-licenses/ 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?
- evanelias 3y agoActually the Business Source License was originally created by MariaDB! It was applied to their database proxy product MaxScale. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KronisLV 3y agoI 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).
- theogravity 3y agoDidn't know MariaDB even traded on the market: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MRDB/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MRDB/ It's at penny-stock-level status with low volume.
- ireallywantthat 3y agotime to use postgresql which doesn't come with these types of drama. https://www.postgresql.org/ https://www.postgresql.org/
- tpmx 3y agoAll my best wishes to Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, I hope they make bank (again!), they deserve it! After all of these years I trust them to do the right thing with the open source aspect. I've never met a more competent and energetic technical "salesperson" than David. I got the impression he spent at least a decade travelling full time, evangelizing MySQL (sales) in the 90s/00s. Mad respect. This is what it took. It didn't happen by itself.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nhourcard 3y agoTheir market cap is $30m, which is more or less what a YC company with good prospects will be valued at nowadays for a seed round. Crazy
- pavlov 3y agoThe difference is that MariaDB is over ten years old and has pursued revenue growth for years, so hopes and dreams can’t obscure the track record of accumulating losses. MariaDB has $50M annual recurring revenue but is spending almost $100M in the same time. There’s only a few millions of cash left, and liabilities outweigh assets. It’s on the brink of bankruptcy. If you bought this company for $30M now, you’d have to pay at least another $30M just to make it through the next few quarters. The investors acquiring the company must be planning big cuts.
- pengaru 3y agoThose of you thinking how crazy it is for MariaDB to be valued at just $30M: This company acquired Clustrix[0] in 2018, so it's not even only a MySQL fork. 30M is an absurdly small number for the embodied IP. (I worked briefly @ Clustrix, the tech is legit, ~$75M funding burned) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustrix