Proposal Seeks To Replace MySQL With MariaDB By Default For Ubuntu 25.04

[JMB9]

First thing is, that this is a decision of Debian and Ubuntu developers ... so it is technical reasoning (not fear).

Second thing is, that Oracle is a company which is hard to deal with ... own experience ... which is a game changer.
This can be seen easily on technical ground ... not fear - which was justified in that case, of cause.

And due to 1st thing maybe this was not considered at all:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/k1-acquires-mariadb-a-leading-database-software-company-and-appoints-new-ceo-302243508.html

so MariaDB was bought and got a new CEO - anounced 10 days ago - so if fear would be the point,
it would not be done at that point in time.
And this is absolutely ok - if problems will follow, we will see another fork being better than the former
(Redis -> Valkey, LXD -> Incus, ...) - as MariaDB is licensed under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1.
Free and Open Source can not be bought or killed - or good ideas being excluded by narrowing developers -
thus only such licenses are good for reliable standards and real progress.

[CommunityMember]

Since MariaDB laid off a third of the company last year and wrote off several million, I assume they need all of the help they can get.

I believe that was the commercial (enterprise) side of the business with their proprietary extensions. Now, it is likely those layoffs did impact the open source/community developers at some level, but the impact was mostly reported to be at the enterprise group (last I knew the enterprise group was still trying to find a business model that worked, and like a lot of companies trying to make money from mostly open source products, that is a large challenge).

[AHSauge]

MySQL is a Free Software under GPLv2 license. Saying that it's open-source only in the name is a lie.
You are free to contribute to MySQL, they accept patches. The commit history is visible to everyone, they are not squashed.

I didn't say they were squashed. They just dump a lot of commits when they release. Until then, it's all hidden. Right now the last commit is from 12th of July. Compare that to the 200+ commits in MariaDB since then. Does this really meet your expectations of an open-source project?

[spicfoo]

so MariaDB was bought and got a new CEO - anounced 10 days ago

Correction: MariaDB is managed by a non-profit foundation and cannot be bought.

https://mariadb.org/

What was acquired is just the commercial business entity called MariaDB Corporation Ab. The press release is obfuscating the distinction.

[emansom]

Since MariaDB laid off a third of the company last year and wrote off several million, I assume they need all of the help they can get.

That shows incompetence in management, one doesn't need millions of dollars and gazillions of employees for a stable database.

Richard Hipp and Howard Chu prove this every single day.

[d3coder]

I didn't say they were squashed. They just dump a lot of commits when they release. Until then, it's all hidden. Right now the last commit is from 12th of July. Compare that to the 200+ commits in MariaDB since then. Does this really meet your expectations of an open-source project?

It's licensed under Free Software license. They let people collaborate. The commits that are published are not squashed.
It meets my expectations and exceeds them in some ways since they accept patches and don't squash commits.
What else do you want? Yes, it's not perfect since they need to synchronize their internal git with external one and most of the development done internally, but it's not a big problem.

[AHSauge]

It's licensed under Free Software license. They let people collaborate. The commits that are published are not squashed.
It meets my expectations and exceeds them in some ways since they accept patches and don't squash commits.
What else do you want? Yes, it's not perfect since they need to synchronize their internal git with external one and most of the development done internally, but it's not a big problem.

So you agree then, it's open-source in name only. It's "we have this pesky GPL license we need to adhere to, so here you go", not a development done out in the open. There's no reviews in public, there's no testing and CI in public, there's no way (as far as I know) for this to be vetted by the community via pre-releases, which leads "trust me bro" type releases. It's only a couple a months since that failed miserably

[Linneris]

I thought it was already the default. I never installed MySQL under Ubuntu after MariaDB packages landed.

[AHSauge]

It's licensed under Free Software license. They let people collaborate. The commits that are published are not squashed.
It meets my expectations and exceeds them in some ways since they accept patches and don't squash commits.
What else do you want? Yes, it's not perfect since they need to synchronize their internal git with external one and most of the development done internally, but it's not a big problem.

This is the bug report that lead to the withdraw of MySQL 8.0.38. Do you notice how open and transparent they are about it? Seriously, have some higher standards for open-source developments

[fitzie]

maria/mysql aren't drop in compatible.

for example from airflow documentation:

Despite significant similarities between MariaDB and MySQL, we DO NOT support MariaDB as a backend for Airflow. There are known problems (for example index handling) between MariaDB and MySQL and we do not test our migration scripts nor application execution on Maria DB. We know there were people who used MariaDB for Airflow and that cause a lot of operational headache for them so we strongly discourage attempts to use MariaDB as a backend and users cannot expect any community support for it because the number of users who tried to use MariaDB for Airflow is very small.

while i find that statement to be a bit FUDish, it's probably true that maria went too far by being a hard fork rather than being a mysql++, but I think the bigger issue was that postgresql has most of the mindshare for developers looking for an opensource database. I personally like postgresql, but i find it very frustrating to administer.