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evaneliasyesterday at 9:34 PM4 repliesview on HN

Some of the cited reasons for moving off MariaDB [1] seem misguided, in my opinion. Especially the part about "K1 are very enterprise-focused, so the database is likely to focus its work on features that are not relevant to us. There's increased risk they drop the free/open source version we use"

K1 acquired the commercial entity behind MariaDB Enterprise, but that's separate from the non-profit MariaDB Foundation. And there's literally zero risk of the MariaDB server suddenly going closed-source; as a fork of MySQL (which is GPL), this is not even legally possible!

[1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/539#issuecomment...


Replies

sailayesterday at 10:43 PM

The GPLv2 doesn't prevent a company from distributing binaries and making the source available on request while development is done behind closed doors. This wouldn't really be "open source" as we typically understand it and might be cause to exclude it from some Linux distros, for example. I'm not saying that K1 would do this (I have no idea who they are or what they do), but I also think it's a reasonable risk to consider.

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zinodaurtoday at 12:06 AM

As a big user of MySQL - moving off of it does seem like a good idea, if you can. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to flee

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edoceoyesterday at 9:41 PM

And even if it did go closed-souce, your existing install can run for ages because the vendor cannot force upgrade. One of my favorite features of FOSS.

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vascoyesterday at 10:14 PM

This makes little sense but I guess they get little traffic so pretty much any database will work for them.

If traffic grows they will find problems, then limitations, then move to postgres. And if not it's fine. Story old as time.