Before we cut to the chase, we want to clarify that a distinction must be made between MariaDB Corporation and MariaDB Foundation.
They are separate entities, as MariaDB Corporation (MariaDB.com) is a commercial, for-profit entity. At the same time, MariaDB Foundation (MariaDB.org) is a non-profit entity that owns open-source products and code bases. Now, back to the topic.
Since MariaDB went public (MRDB) on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2022, things have not gone as expected, as seen in the chart below.
As a result, referencing a document published by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it is clear that MariaDB will undergo major changes in an attempt “to better align its workforce with the needs of its business and to reduce the Company’s operating costs.“
What do these changes involve? First, MariaDB Corporation will lay off 84 employees, which is about 28% of its staff. This will result in $3.1 million in severance, notice period, benefits, and related costs.
Furthermore, the company will discontinue developing additional products, such as SkySQL (a cloud offering) and Xpand (an ultra-ha solution), focusing solely on its primary offering, the MariaDB Enterprise Server database.
This means that they will no longer be offered to customers, which puts in a delicate situation the businesses currently decided to bet on them. One such is the tech giant Samsung.
For reference, the Samsung Cloud Operation Team currently uses over 50 Xpand nodes that operate as a single database, sustaining tens of billions of daily transactions.
So, like many others, they will need to plan to migrate their existing services to another quickly. But worse is that this is a hit to MariaDB Corporation’s reputation regarding predictability and trust.
Despite all this, there is no cause for concern about the MariaDB Foundation, which develops the MariaDB database, one of the world’s most popular and widely used free and open-source RDBMS.
However, it should be kept in mind that the MariaDB Corporation is the primary code contributor to the MariaDB Foundation. But considering that the foundation recently announced a large sponsorship from Amazon Web Services (AWS), things are going more than well there.
