Easier licensing of MCAs for MariaDB contributors

Software licensing is a difficult subject that we don’t usually want to think about. It can be confusing and frustrating trying to work out whether different licenses are compatible, and problems like dual-licensing make it even harder. We all just want to write great code, not worry about licenses!

Until now, contributors who provide improvements and bug fixes to MariaDB have been asked to declare their license choice every time they make a contribution. For new contributors, or those who just want to submit a very small fix, this can be a complicated extra step they weren’t expecting. For regular contributors, it’s extra work for every single pull request. …

Running MariaDB in a Docker container

Virtualisation has been a very popular technique for both development and production systems for many years. It allows multiple software environments to run on the same physical machine.

Containerisation takes this idea even further. It allows you to segment your software environment down to the level of individual software packages. This means you can install multiple copies of MariaDB on one system, and run them in parallel while keeping them isolated from each other.

This is a very powerful technique when doing development because you can quickly test different versions of the software. It also allows you to experiment with clusters: you can create a complete Galera database cluster on a single computer! …