[evanelias]

MariaDB Server is GPL and must always remain GPL, as it's a fork of MySQL which was also GPL.

Also the MariaDB Foundation is separate from the commercial/enterprise entity MariaDB plc. This article is about the latter being taken private.

[steve918]

This code base has been sold like 3x now and is still around.

[kijin]

If anything, that looks like solid evidence of the resiliency of GPL.

[gigatexal]

Thank you all for assuaging my fears. Yay for the GPL.

[evanelias]

Ehh, not exactly, personally I wouldn't agree that the first half of that statement is correct.

I think it's important to stress that this article (press release, really) is about MariaDB plc being sold. That was the previously-publicly-traded commercial entity which develops MariaDB Enterprise and other paid solutions. But the MariaDB Community Server code base is maintained by the MariaDB Foundation, which is totally separate. (That said, MariaDB plc is the largest outside code contributor to MariaDB Community Server as well; but they're technically not the maintainers of it.)

It's also important to understand that MariaDB and MySQL have diverged in functionality over the years, and MySQL is still actively developed by Oracle, who have consistently put some serious engineering effort into it. Many folks on HN seem to think that MySQL died and MariaDB replaced it, as some sort of successor across a linear history; that's not accurate and in reality MySQL is extremely widely used.

[stephenr]

Also worth noting that Oracle makes their sql proxy (mysql router) available under gpl too.

MariaDB's sql proxy was GPL but went BSL at v2.0 (around 2016 iirc).