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.
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.)
Founder's investment to start bootstrapped is often opportunity cost of time (years of work instead of earning salary). Maybe some cash invested too.
Or with VC, after years of work a founder's biggest asset is the common shares that are worth $0 if company folds.
Companies not run by shareholders but employees are often unremarkable but do well in long term. From time to time family owned companies choose that path.
Would you also throw in your savings next quarter to pay for the new losses? And the next quarter? And after that?
Paying $30M today isn’t enough when the business is making heavy losses and nearly out of money. You need to have a plan to either raise a lot more money very soon, cut costs, or probably both. Employees aren’t well positioned to do either.
Edit: my bad - Sun acquired it, not Oracle. Made me all sad for Suns demise again.
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
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).
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-innova...
Oracle is not a tech company but a law firm that happens to have an engineering department.
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)