This Month in MariaDB Foundation: September 2025

September was a month of big ideas, long-term thinking, and vibrant community energy for the MariaDB Foundation. Our Board of Directors met for what may well have been the most strategic session in Foundation history – and our community, in parallel, pushed the frontiers of innovation in AI, open source collaboration, and real-world adoption.

Let’s take a tour through the highlights — and yes, a few of these stories carried over into early October, simply because we had too much good news to contain in one month.

Strategic Vision: Strengthening the MariaDB Board

Our late-September Board of Directors meeting was all about looking ahead.

When Oracle Drops the Ball: Why MariaDB is the Future of the MySQL World

The news has circulated quietly in industry corners, but the implications are far too significant to brush aside: Oracle seems to have ended the Open Source era of MySQL.

I am not a spokesperson for Oracle, yet the signs are unmistakable. Entire teams associated with MySQL at Oracle have been dissolved, spanning engineering, development and sales. On LinkedIn, I’ve received a wave of messages from former colleagues — both long-time MySQL veterans and those who joined Oracle years after MariaDB was founded in 2009.

The impression is clear: Oracle has made a rational business decision to pivot towards AI and cloud, where MySQL only matters insofar as it strengthens OCI and Heatwave.

Passbolt becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation

MariaDB Foundation is delighted to announce that Passbolt has joined as a Silver Sponsor, further strengthening the European open source ecosystem.Passbolt is the European open source platform for secure credential collaboration. It can be used for managing passwords, secrets, and privileged accesses. Passbolt is built for security-conscious tech teams while remaining usable by everyone. It adapts to a large variety of use cases, from IT and DevOps workflows to organization-wide credential management. It supports secure collaboration with granular access controls, and can be self-hosted to meet data sovereignty and compliance needs. Today, more than 50,000 organizations, including governments, startups and regulated companies, use Passbolt everyday to protect their most critical credentials while retaining transparency, control, and auditability.

Mydbops Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

We are delighted to announce that Mydbops has joined the MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor!

Mydbops is a trusted leader in open-source database consulting, empowering organizations worldwide to design, optimize, and scale their MySQL and MariaDB environments. Our dedication to operational excellence and community-driven innovation aligns seamlessly with the MariaDB Foundation’s mission to promote openness, adoption, and continuous advancement of MariaDB.

This partnership reinforces the importance of service providers and consultants in the MariaDB ecosystem and marks another step forward in our commitment to open collaboration.

Thank you, Mydbops, for your support and trust.

Diegesis becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation to champion digital transformation in an open-source environment

Diegesis, the London-based business and technology consultancy, is pleased to announce that it has joined the non-profit MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor to ensure one of the world’s most popular database servers – that also powers Wikipedia – remains free of charge and accessible to all.  The MariaDB Server is a general-purpose open-source Relational Database Management System (DBMS) that relies solely on funding from benefactors like Diegesis.  Today’s announcement also strengthens Diegesis’ commitment to enabling organisations in the public and private sector to modernise and migrate their legacy systems to the latest technology frameworks without vendor lock-in, limits or licensing traps.

Virtuozzo Becomes Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation — Advancing European Cloud Sovereignty

The MariaDB Foundation is proud to welcome Virtuozzo as a Silver Sponsor, reinforcing a shared commitment to building an open, sovereign, and innovation-driven digital future for Europe.

Virtuozzo is a pioneer in virtualization and cloud infrastructure software, with deep European roots and global reach. Their support of the MariaDB Foundation is not just a sponsorship — it’s a statement of strategic alignment between two organizations shaping the backbone of an independent European technology ecosystem.

This partnership brings together two essential layers of infrastructure — Virtuozzo powering the cloud and MariaDB powering the data.

“I Am Not Building Cadillacs Anymore”

The Ford–Cadillac Parable

In 1902, Henry Ford’s second car company was taken over by investors and renamed Cadillac. The designs were his. The engineering was his. But the brand? That now belonged to someone else.

So Ford walked away and started fresh.

Years later, even as Ford cars became wildly successful, people kept asking:

“Are you the guy who builds Cadillacs?”

To which he had to answer—over and over again:

“No. I’m not building Cadillacs anymore.”

It took years before the public truly grasped the difference.

MariaDB Foundation Welcomes Rumahweb as a Silver Sponsor

We are thrilled to announce that Rumahweb, one of Indonesia’s most trusted and long-standing web hosting providers, has joined the MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor.

Founded in 2002, Rumahweb has built a reputation for reliability, innovation, and a strong commitment to customer support. With a wide range of offerings — including shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, and domain services — Rumahweb empowers individuals, SMEs, and large enterprises alike to succeed in the digital space. Backed by 24/7 professional technical assistance, they have become a pillar of Indonesia’s internet infrastructure.