I'm wondering what will prevent that open source project from being sold (like MySQL was)? The prospect of having a stable open source database engine is nice, but then it gets sold to a big corporation (Oracle in case of MySQL), and gets killed off (presumable to push paying customers towards their own DB). The original developers leave the project, development and maintenance stalls, and whoever was using the DB freely, now has to transition to something else.

So now MariaDB gets this funding, they might just as well work on the product for couple of years, build up user and paying customer base, and then sell it off. If i were giving grants as a government entity, i would consider adding a condition to the deal that they can't sell the software and have to keep it open-source and free.