One can say about Google / Facebook / Amazon investing in startups and non-profits inevitably influence these organizations' directions; that's just the nature of any investments. When you donate money to a cause you support, you indirectly influence how the cause is headed, because you can pull the pledge, and when enough people pull the pledge, then the people running the cause/non-profits will have to do something to the demand of the donators.
China is the biggest creditor of the US national debt, and even before that US was careful with its relationship with China anyway. So we can't say there is a cause and effect, the best is a weak correlation, and even that is a stretch.
[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/alibaba/investments
China is the biggest creditor to the US national debt
http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/16/investing/china-us-debt-trea...
Do you want me to be more precise? Foreign creditor?
"The Treasury Department has ranked China as the biggest foreign creditor to the U.S. for the overwhelming majority of the past nine years. "
That's not being more precise. That's something entirely different.
(Not agreeing or disagreeing with you, just kind of funny/ironic that we're talking about a fork of an open source project that exists because of disagreement with the steward of MySQL... if Alibaba negatively impacts MariaDB, couldn't we just then move on to another fork. MylantaDB anyone?)
Monty is the one who first created MySQL, and later foked MySQL to create MariaDB. There is also MaxDB, but it looks to be a SAP product.
It's open source- when that happens, you can fork it and influence it in the direction that you like. I mean if the GCHQ has an active github account[1] - I think the PRC gets a pass to publish open source, let alone Alibaba.
Yes, but the Western governments are moving in a similar direction. I'd rather Alibaba sponsor MariaDB than not.
I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.
Only if the backdoor is obvious. I doubt they would introduce a backdoor that reads
`if ($PWD = "supersecretbackdoorpwd") loginAs("root");`
But a subtle buffer overrun resulting in a 0day that's only obvious to the writers - that's much more likely.
Check out the Underhanded C contest for examples of ways exploits can hide in plain sight.
EDIT: I'm not saying that's what going to happen with Alibaba & MariaDb. I'm just saying that "open source" != "free of exploits and backdoors". One of the biggest untruths about open source is that, with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
This kind of stories doesn't seems to hurt the US HDD maker 's brand, neither.
Most of the world just don't care or don't have a choice.