Year 2014 was an important year for the MariaDB project with the release of MariaDB 10.0. Adoption continued to grow both organically and by MariaDB being included both in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux Enterprise Server distributions as the default database option. Ubuntu started providing MariaDB as an option since their release 14.04. MariaDB also came available in many cloud services, e.g. DBaaS in the Rackspace Cloud and Cloud Foundry. Those are just a few highlights. There is of course a lot of other news from last year which has already been covered earlier.
If you’re interested in what the MariaDB Foundation worked on last year, Monty wrote a wrap-up on it. You can find it here.
In this article I want to focus on a few recent changes related to the MariaDB Foundation. On Monday this week, the MariaDB Foundation had its first board meeting of the year. In addition to all the general things on a board meeting agenda there were the following topics:
- New memberships
- Approval of new board member
- Approval of new CEO
A Norwegian company called Visma has become a member of the MariaDB Foundation. Visma is a 6,000 person software company focused on finance and accounting software and services.
As part of Visma becoming a member it was also suggested that Visma gets a representative on the board. It would be hard to find a more suitable person for the job than Espen Håkonsen, CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications.
The MariaDB Foundation has been looking for a new CEO since Simon Phipps left last fall. Late last year discussions started with Otto Kekäläinen and he got interested. Otto is an entrepreneur in the open source business in Finland. He is the CEO of the open source consulting company Seravo. In addition he has several important open source roles in Finland and Europe. Otto is Finland’s representative in the Free Software Foundation Europe and in the steering group of COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Systems and Solutions, the umbrella open source association in Finland. Otto will also serve as the Secretary of the board.
These changes in the board and management of the MariaDB Foundation were approved in the board meeting. I’m delighted to have Espen and Otto to join the MariaDB Foundation. They bring a lot of new experience and ideas to the foundation. Welcome!
Chairman of the board
Rasmus Johansson