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. …

MariaDB Foundation CEO steps down

The time has come for me, Otto Kekäläinen, after serving as the CEO of the MariaDB Foundation since January 2015, to step down. The board has already quietly been searching for a new CEO for some months, but no contract has been signed as of yet, so if you are interested in the position, please send an application to jobs@mariadb.org.

This is a good time for a change of leadership. Some 4 years ago when I started in the MariaDB Foundation the MariaDB Server was clearly the underdog compared to it’s biggest rival. Since then we have won major successes and are now well established as the new M in LAMP thanks to our broad uptake in Linux distributions and development environments (such as WAMP, XAMP, VVV etc.), hosting companies boast on their websites that they offer MariaDB and many developers and architects seem to prefer MariaDB due to our reputation of being well built. …