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.
The foundation is not supposed to make any profit and our finances are quite balanced despite the accounts showing a significant surplus for 2017. This anomaly is due to one platinum level sponsorship payment and a few smaller ones we got at the end of the year and naturally not immediately spent. Looking at our financials in a longer time frame the sums mostly evens out. From previous years we have some debt and losses. The year 2017 was a great milestone for the MariaDB Foundation as it was the first year we did not run out of operation funds at the end of the year.
A reminder that the report about our activities in 2017 has already been published in the blog back in March 2017, which covers what the Foundation staff did.
All of the Foundation income comes from of donations from companies and individuals all over the world. The single biggest sponsors were Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft and Tencent Cloud, followed by Booking.com, Visma and the MariaDB Corporation. We thank all our sponsors for supporting the MariaDB Foundation and thus supporting continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem.
Remember that the MariaDB Foundation is only a very small core of a gigantic ecosystem. The purpose of the MariaDB Foundation is not to drive all of that ecosystem, but simply to support it and enable others to be productive and successful with the MariaDB open source software.
If you use MariaDB, please donate to the MariaDB Foundation to help us in our mission so the open and collaborative development can continue to prosper for years to come.