Mariadb.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org
medium.com
medium.com
It certainly seems like the company is going down the toilet, but I'd be dubious about the motivations of an anonymous rant on Medium about a publicly traded company.
I'm thinking those accusations are probably just slurs by someone with a grudge.
I'm running into all kinds of paywalls with Glassdoor and I don't want to register, but google searches make it look like pretty much every company under the sun has a Glassdoor review complaining of racism, sexism, etc. For instance this one claims that Apple is homophobic, racist, sexist, and "very Trumpian":
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Apple-RVW1...
The larger the company, the larger that departments will evolve their internal culture... and if team leads do not take care to prevent discriminatory bullshit, it will grow roots and fester.
Every so often, I read here or on Reddit the question "why should companies involve themselves into kitchen room talk?"... the answer is simple: failure to do so will reflect very negatively on your company's image and thus its hiring perspectives. When I search for hotels, Amazon products, whatever - I don't go for the good reviews, I go for the bad ones.
> You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa"
You’re hardly representing an unbiased viewpoint, and this isn’t a problem Apple has.
It absolutely is a problem Apple has, judging by at least three lawsuits which I could find in literally 30 seconds of Googling [1][2][3] - and it isn't just recent claims either, I could find one that went back to 2001 [4].
And yes, a lack of diversity in hiring can also lead to other problems down the road, such as racial bias in sensors [5].
All of these events could have been prevented by focusing on an inclusive corporate culture.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-apple-lawyer-lawsuit-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/03/appletoo-...
[3] https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/10/black-employee-sues-...
[4] https://www.wired.com/2001/11/apple-hit-with-racial-lawsuit/
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/12/29/apple...
You're moving the goalposts. In your opinion, is being "very Trumpian" a problem that Apple has? Is Tim Cook running around in a MAGA hat and I totally did not notice?
Edit: Regarding that 2001 article, it's just an article about a lawsuit being filed, which anyone can do whether they have a case or not. I haven't yet found that case, but I found a similar one from 2005 by an apparently obese Black lesbian woman represented by the same law firm:
Here's the trial order. Skimming it, it seems the plaintiff was a terrible employee and her case was so bad she and her lawyers were sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit:
https://casetext.com/case/patterson-v-apple-computer
> Burmeister offered plaintiff an opportunity to support the Apple Hardware Engineering organization, believing that this opportunity would give her a chance to showcase her skills and build a base of support for her clients.... This assignment was not successful. Plaintiff's engineering clients, including Cheryl Smith ("Smith"), an African-American HR Senior Director, found plaintiff to be unresponsive, unhelpful, and rude. Smith believed plaintiff had minimal interpersonal skills. According to Smith, plaintiff frequently responded, "No," or "That's not my job," when Smith sought her assistance. Plaintiff was also resistant to providing data on bonuses, stating that the task was hard. Smith received complaints from her HR team about plaintiff's attitude and refusal to perform work. These problems caused Smith ultimately to limit her interaction with Smith, and to seek intervention from Burmeister.
> Judy Goodson ("Goodson"), another African-American HR Director, found plaintiff to be often unavailable, rude, disrespectful, and negative. To create an opportunity for plaintiff, Goodson invited her to make a presentation to a Senior Vice President and his staff. However, plaintiff declined....
> According to plaintiff's colleague Deborah House ("House"), plaintiff was frequently absent from department staff meetings and quarterly HR Department meetings. According to Burmeister, plaintiff was rude to her colleagues in the Compensation Group, prompting Burmeister to counsel her repeatedly about her inappropriate tone, demeanor, and ability to work with others and be a team player.
> Plaintiff's work day was also interrupted by ongoing personal appointments and activities. She maintained a standing weekly hair appointment during working hours. Starting in February 2002, she commenced weekly sessions with a psychologist whose office was in Oakland, approximately 60 miles from Apple's Cupertino offices. She also spent up to and hour and a half a day trading her personal stock portfolio, and at other times played video games and did crossword puzzles on her computer.
> Plaintiff believed she was entitled to yearly merit increases and promotions. However, Apple had a salary freeze in effect from the time plaintiff was hired until late 2003. Thus, the first opportunity for plaintiff to receive a merit increase was in connection with the review cycle in November 2003. When plaintiff learned that she was not receiving a merit increase, she accessed two Apple databases during work hours to obtain confidential salary and tenure information regarding certain of her colleagues....
> Subsequently, as part of the investigation, plaintiff met with Parker and Hull. Plaintiff confirmed that she had accessed and reviewed her manager's and co-workers' salaries and confidential information independent of any business reason. She considered it appropriate to access the information, and admitted that she had distributed the information to her attorney and therapist. She also confirmed that she had chosen to use a personal laptop for her work at Apple, and therefore possessed confidential Apple information on that laptop. At the conclusion of the meeting, Parker told plaintiff she was suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation....
> On November 18, 2003, plaintiff filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC (charge No. 377-2004-00145), alleging discrimination on the basis of race, and retaliation for engaging in protected activities.
> The court finds that the motion must be GRANTED. Plaintiff has provided no facts to support the racial harassment claim against Walker, failed to state any factual or legal basis for the retaliation claim or the defamation claim against Walker, and stated no facts showing that her invasion of privacy claim was well-grounded in fact or law. On more than one occasion, defendants put plaintiff on notice that her claims against Walker were frivolous, but plaintiff persisted...
> The court awards defendants $5,000 in sanctions against plaintiff and her counsel, the Law Offices of Waukeen Q. McCoy.
I never set goalposts to begin with ffs. The post my original reply was aimed at claimed that:
> > I'm thinking those accusations are probably just slurs by someone with a grudge.
To which I replied that essentially every organization will have bad apples and it's good corporate governance to weed these bad apples out.
Then, in response to someone else thinking it might be a civilized idea to claim I might be biased in favor of anti-discrimination, I listed sources proving a decades-long history of Apple teams and leadership being independently accused of discrimination because apparently one needs to prove what should be common sense, and now you come on and accuse me of moving goalposts? WTF?
> Edit: Regarding that 2001 article, it's just an article about a lawsuit being filed, which anyone can do whether they have a case or not. I haven't yet found that case, but I found a similar one from 2005:
Just saw your edit as well. Yes, people can feel free to file whatever claims they want, but the key thing is that there is a pattern of allegations. It is the very nature of discrimination claims that they are excessively hard to prove unless you have recordings or someone willing to act as a witness and burn themselves along with you on blacklists.
I don't know if you saw my subsequent edit (and long quotes from the court), but the case I found was frivolous.
A "pattern of allegations" doesn't prove anything if the allegations are lies. People lie all the time. They can even lie to themselves and convince themselves they were wronged to avoid dealing with their own problems.
You’re primed to see your ideological enemies hiding everywhere, and so you do.
Yeah, I was turned off by this too. Unfortunately this is the psyche of the western world. You disagree with me? You're racist. You think bias in an ML model comes from bias in data. You're a bigot. Such accusation works and LeCun apologizes.
Even your concrete example is ridiculous. “ML bias tends to come from biased training data” is…THE widely accepted viewpoint. The whole CONVERSATION around ML bias, from academia to MSM shovelware articles, is framed this way: that ML is not an escape hatch from pre-existing biases.
As someone that definitely considers themselves an SJW (to use the lingo that I bet that you use), and that runs in these circles, the only time I see the viewpoint that you’re arguing against is in the form of strawmen posed by stunted kids on 4chan complaining about “pronouns” or something.
""" Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.
To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.
The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
"""
* No async drivers.
* Total freezeup bug that only appears when MariaDB is under high load, since mid-2021 (10.6), not yet addressed.
* Postgres 15 outperforming MariaDB in both my own SELECT and INSERT benchmarks. Up to double performance for INSERT.
* Less and less compatibility with MySQL. Vitess dropping MariaDB.
* Postgres has a lighter setup, super fast compile in 2023. Standalone / portable Postgres is amazing: https://gist.github.com/gnat/cfe3754c3dc817c7fb8b2225ef4db62...
I do enjoy the MariaDB / MySQL tooling and syntax way more as a developer, and MaxScale etc. seems good, but there's only so much BS i'm willing to deal with when Postgres exists.
Lately I've been writing a REST back end on top of MariaDB at work, and I swear it's going to drive me insane with its arbitrary limitations.
At least SQLite offers something in return that Postgres can't do.
If you're going to throw allegations around, at least get your facts straight. MariaDB and MySQL support complex replication topologies out of the box, including multi-master. Yes, it does come in useful if implemented correctly: we built a business application for a particular setup with many branches around the country, many of which have very unreliable network and must be able to continue working with a local database when that network is not available. It has been running for 4-5 years without issues.
They're also much easier to support: for example, upgrades are handled automatically — no need to dump and restore or resort to weird tricks; you can easily upgrade through ten major versions just by installing the latest version and restarting the daemon.
Some other features off the top of my mind: compression (zlib, lz4, lzo, zstd), versioned tables (an absolute life-saver if you need audit).
How do you deal with reconciling after a connection loss? Is your client application read-only / the data sharded in a way that it doesn't matter for other branches if one branch is offline?
Yeah, for years, MySQL shipped with a default storage format that didn't enforce constraints.
That it wasn't the best engine for all use cases and also corrupted data on disk occasionally is a different story. Once InnoDb was ready, you could just mix and match engines in one DB server as far as I remember and use referential constraints where needed.
Later MongoDB marketed itself as "web scale" due to no schema constraints at all. Fun times.
If you work with a tech for long enough you get the tooling "figured out" and things can feel like second nature. Maybe some alternative has equally "good" tooling (for however you define "good") but it may have slightly different quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. The fact that you have to figure that stuff out is itself a negative.
Easy upgrades? With MySQL it has never been more involved than running apt-get dist-upgrade/docker rm mysql && docker run mysql/kubectl deploy, depending on the stack. Downtimes of less than two minutes.
In contrast, PostgreSQL is such a hassle to upgrade that I only do it when forced to by an application dropping support for the current major version.
My only interaction with MariaDB was picking it from a list of possible RDS images because the description basically said, "MySQL but better". Since i was paying AWS to run that service, was there money going to the MariaDB corporation? Or was AWS using the free open source one and pocketing the cash. I'm definitely out of my depth here
[0]: https://mariadb.org/mariadb-contribution-statistics-march-20...
For context MariaDB existed before 2020, Before the Plc, since 2009, and will continue to exist after.
This is the company we are talking about, not the FOSS-ed version.
If Microsoft has become a Platinum Sponsor for Azure support, you have nothing to worry about; the MySQL team that moved to MariaDB along with Monty will offer their support for you.
See the video by Monty near the end of https://mariadb.org/donate/
>
> If you are employed at MariaDB, you absolutely need to be scheduling interviews with other companies.
Third time's the charm? Monty you should retain control over the companies that you want to sell your product under. If you don't control over 50% then it's not "your company" anymore.
Founders will virtually always lose control once they hop on the investor conveyor belt. It can happen as soon as Round A e.g. VC wants 25% with 10% option pool and seed investors owns 15% (say due to carry along provisions) - et voila - founder diluted to 50%! It often is inevitable as soon as a founder takes seed money because (a) if you must take seed you probably need future cash for competitive growth, and (b) seed investors define expectation of future VC rounds (e.g. YC demo day). The well known exceptions where founders retained control are outliers.
Furthermore, founders are third class because investors get first class preferential shares. Preferential shares have a variety of powerful benefits over common shares - including rights to oust the founders (under conditions that will usually occur: VCs take advantage of the natural optimism of founders).
Even worse: the game is systematically rigged against founders, because VCs are “the house” and have been setting up the rules while playing multiple games for decades, but it is usually a founders first game. Bacon and egg breakfast: where the founders are the fully committed pigs providing the bacon, but the investors are chickens providing the eggs. 10 years of life is one hock. If a founder wins a game and want to play again, then a founder often starts their own casino by doing seed rounds. Sometimes a successful founder can afford to start a new business without using VC investment (self-invests).
VC capital can be a drug worth taking if you fully manage your risks. Just beware that the industry rule-of-thumb is that 90% of the time a founder has an expected payout of approximately $0.
The YCombinator casino is a bit of an exception because they better understand how much a founder is worth so they help founders play games with other casinos. But you still can’t argue that your sweat equity should be equally worth dollars invested: a software developer taking a $100k paycut for the first year of a startup should receive $100k of preferential shares - but I have never heard of that happening. Subtle game play.
It was really company "ran by engineers" focused on developers. Later though he merged with "SkySQL" and the company became MariaDB Corporation
There were two options then. mSQL where you couldn't join between two tables. And Postgress95 which crashed sometimes as soon as a client connected.
MySQL had been a breath of fresh air.
I just checked with some people I know over there and they can still slack Monty. He is still in their hr thing. Also, the old CFO wasn’t fired, he had to leave for some reason but still worked there for months after. They have a new CFO already. https://mariadb.com/newsroom/press-releases/mariadb-names-co...
Lawsuits are usually public and you can google it. There’s no crazy lawsuits like the person says. It’s just lies.
My wall street buddy told me the insurance stuff is standard practice when a company goes public. I think every public company has this. All the stuff about business risk is like standard boilerplate stuff. Every company is at risk if they don’t make profit or meet targets. Like wtf?
Even the stock price stuff - Look at the volumes, someone is screwing with them. Employees can’t sell yet anyway.
There’s accusations of "racism, sexism, and abuse" but like their youtube has women and a guy with a turban and a bunch of other races. There’s no lawsuits I could find either.
It’s like all taken out of context from SEC filings to make some sort of bullshit story.
LinkedIn shows ~350 employees with about half of them in the US. $4.8 million is far from plenty to pay 300+ employees...not counting lawyers.
4.800.000 / 100 = $48,000 per person. For one year.
Not counting all other business expenses like servers. Laptops. Slack. Zoom.
As for why it's included over MySQL, it's undoubtedly the fact that MySQL has been owned by Oracle since 2010. Oracle has not been the most friendly to OSS communities in the past.
This is supposed to be about "racism, sexism" and stuff like that, but I don't necessarily see any contradiction. Because it's not unheard of that in troubled companies, questionable people rise to or stay in power that would not stand a chance in a more healthy environment where better candidates don't run away. Selection for the kind of person who'd rather be captain on a sinking wreck than some lower officer on a well run boat and I'd be surprised if there wasn't considerable correlation between those and the scandal that's supposedly the root cause here.
It never stopped, but it did seem to stagnate a fair bit for a while meaning that MariaDB trumped it on some features & fixes. For instance CTE support arrived in stable releases about a year earlier. That of course may not be the case any more.
We have low visibility into MySQL development process (is the bug tracker still closed? I am not sure), so when they shipped 8.0 in 2018 it was quite a surprise. They fixed a number of outstanding issues, including many extremely bad defaults (like using proper Unicode by default). Some things added in 8.0 (like atomic DDL) are still not available in MariaDB. Oracle being Oracle, there haven't been any major releases since.
It makes sense if the distribution no longer includes mysql, and the mysql the distribution included previously was from before the fork: users who already had mysql installed would be automatically migrated to a compatible replacement. It's the same thing which happened with openoffice and libreoffice.
What actually happened is more like they changed their name, and sold the old name to Oracle. Oracle then forked and carried on developing a new product under the old name, while the original team carried on developing the old product under the new name (mariadb).
That is why distros did what they did.
MariaDB is the fork, technically speaking. The distro switch took some time, probably in part because they wanted to wait and see if MariaDB would be suitable / sustainable.
Fedora and openSUSE switched to MariaDB in 2013, in part due to Oracle's license changes and changes to info published in CVEs and because they were considered easier to work with. (See: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/201...)
This is a reference to another HN item on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468540
What did he do before joining and crashing mariadb?
He joined MariaDB 7 years ago, in 2015. Before then he hasC9 (A SaaS company), Greenplum, EMC, 10 jobs in total. In the late 90s he lists 4 years as "VP of data warehousing and integration technologies" at Oracle.
(I am a MariaDB user, btw, so... hoping that it doesn't go completely in the toilet.)
Monty didn't "snag IP" or perform a "clever stunt". He forked a GPL codebase the same as anyone else can do. His goal was not to do another IPO.
I get that talking about things you don't actually understand is perfectly human, but Monty's about 99% great guy pretty much all the time. If you want to snipe, take aim at the one thing he actually did wrong, instead of the things other people did wrong with his babies.
I believe that simply "This is yet another case of American corporatism failing", full stop. It's a loophole in the system.
It's a good thing that MariaDB is open source, so that a failure like this can't bring the product down.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mariadb-announces-first-quart...
The curse is on companies that decide to completely own some popular open source program. If you are happy to just be successful together with other people, you'll be fine.
Can you please explain? They just ran out of money. They never did a SPAC.
Several times I've come into their irc channel on libera and asked some dumb question and Monty himself answers me. How many other projects that have lived through an Oracle acquisition can you say that about?
I'm sad, every time I do benchmarks for specific use cases, MariaDB turns out to have better performance but we do need to think about sustainability.
Sooner or later, we will say good bye to it.
I stopped reading right there - MariaDB (corp) went public via a SPAC in Dec 2022. Hopefully this is nature healing itself and the Corp entity goes to the wall and the Open Source foundation sheds the parasite.
I also hope all the grifters involved wind up broke and homeless.
Now you didn't ask for Postgres advantages but I know a lot too, I like the choice and competition.