Arjen’s Last Post

Tonight marks the conclusion of my brief period at the MariaDB Foundation.

The MDBF team is a wonderful diverse and talented group of people, and it has been my absolute honour and pleasure to work with each and every one of them.  It was great to meet almost everybody (and some of your families!) at our recent MDBF staff meeting in Helsinki, and also to see you working on things together. You rock!  I have no doubt that each of you will continue to grow and thrive in your individual field.

To everyone in the MariaDB Community, it has also been a great pleasure meeting, talking and working with you.  …

My first week, Looking Forward

First of all, thank you for your warm words of welcome – coming from so many people across different media, I think this is a very positive sign for working with the organisations and individuals within the MariaDB community.

Regardless of the situation, a change like this, or actually the person that comes in, is often described as a “new broom”.  So I’m a new broom.  This can provide a fresh start throughout, with an opportunity to clean up some stuff that is outdated, improve a few things, and execute new initiatives.

In my first week as CEO I’ve been talking with all our staff and of course reading  up on many things.  …

Hello World from the new MariaDB Foundation CEO: Arjen Lentz

It’s both my pleasure and honour to write this post.  Quite a few of you will know (of) me, but since that’s not necessarily the case I’ll try and make this a quick intro, as well as laying out some aspects of my thoughts and plans for the near future.

Who is Arjen?

A long time ago now, I was employee#25 at MySQL AB.  During that period (2001-2007) I worked on the MySQL reference manual and built the docs team, spoke at many conferences, user groups and events, built the global community relations team and its activities, was program chair for the 2005 and 2006 MySQL Users’ Conference, taught training courses, and represented the company in Australia. …

Tencent Games becomes a Gold Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation

The MariaDB Foundation today announces that Tencent Games – online game developer and operator by Tencent Interactive Entertainment – has become a Gold Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation. As one of the world’s largest video game companies, Tencent Games shows the way to the ceaselessly-growing video game industry by supporting the open source development of MariaDB.

The sponsorship will help the Foundation in its mission to ensure continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem, and to drive adoption, serving an ever growing community of users and developers.

Tencent has been actively supporting the open collaboration in MariaDB environment since 2016.

Percona Becomes Bronze Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation

The MariaDB Foundation is happy to announce that Percona, one of the oldest and most well known open source database support and services companies, has joined as a sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.

Percona’s ongoing commitment to the open source database community is reflected in several ways, including hosting the Percona Live Open Source Database Conference, participating in meet-ups and webinars, and partnering with other key players in the open source database arena, including Mesosphere, Microsoft and AWS. Sponsorship of the MariaDB Foundation will help the Foundation support continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem, drive adoption, and serve an ever-growing community of users and developers.

MariaDB Foundation financial report for 2017

The 2017 accounting for the MariaDB Foundation has been completed and the key figures are:

  • Total income: 476,952.38 USD
  • Total expenses: 476,952.38 USD
  • Net income after adjustments: 153,890.65 USD

Staff costs were about 292 000 USD. Travel costs were only about 30 000 USD. The remaining 23 000 USD is administration (accounting, finances, legal) and other expenses. As some of our staff cost is also administration (mostly the CEO) we can estimate that about 90 % (260k out of 292k) goes to software development related activities (including documentation and packaging), so we are quite efficient on how the funds are used. …

Testing Rocket.Chat and Zulip

The MariaDB Foundation is publicly testing two new communications tools, Rocket.Chat and Zulip, and we’re seeing if they can meet a few of our requirements.

Roughly in order of importance:

1) Open Source
2) A tool similar in functionality to the proprietary Slack.
3) A tool for internal staff chat, replacing some of the proprietary options used at present.
4) A tool with a good hosted solution so that we do not have to worry about hosting and maintaining.
5) A tool to replace/enhance IRC (preferably with good integration).
6) A replacement for proprietary voice and video call channels mainly for internal use. …

MariaDB Foundation now accepts cryptocurrency donations

The MariaDB Foundation has added Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero and Ripple to the list of ways to contribute financially.

After experiencing problems with Paypal and disabling it as a means of contribution, our individual donations dropped off as not everyone found the alternatives, such as paying directly into the bank account, convenient.

We recently adding Liberapay as a payment method, and have now started accepting a number of cryptocurrencies. If you wish to donate in a cryptocurrency that is not yet supported, please let us know (you can do so in the comments on this post), and if there is enough demand we will consider adding it as an option. …