[HN Gopher] Mariadb.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mariadb.com is dead, long live MariaDB.org
        
       Author : edent
       Score  : 211 points
       Date   : 2023-04-06 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
        
       | jcadam wrote:
       | There are still plenty of devs who just spin up mysql (rather
       | than mariadb) without thinking about it when starting a new
       | project. Because that's what they always do.
        
         | zerocrates wrote:
         | Why shouldn't they? MySQL 8 is pretty good.
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | As unwelcome as I find it, I guess this will cause people to
       | switch to Oracle MySQL is they need full $$$$ support for their
       | databases.
        
         | fmajid wrote:
         | Could Percona be a white knight for MariaDB (the project, not
         | the company)? Ownership by Oracle is an immediate deal-breaker
         | for me.
        
       | warent wrote:
       | Good grief I don't know what to make of this, but it does make me
       | feel glad that I've chosen to specialize in Postgres
        
       | kerblang wrote:
       | Well, I _was_ wondering: Can one guy really IPO the same product
       | _twice_? It was quite a clever stunt quitting Oracle, snagging IP
       | on the way out, and just rinse /repeat to another $billion+ but
       | it seemed to good to be true. I guess it was.
       | 
       | (I am a MariaDB user, btw, so... hoping that it doesn't go
       | completely in the toilet.)
        
         | ergonaught wrote:
         | We didn't IPO MySQL, we were acquired by Sun. We were on track
         | for IPO, yes, but there were too many acquisition offers to
         | bother.
         | 
         | Monty didn't "snag IP" or perform a "clever stunt". He forked a
         | GPL codebase the same as anyone else can do. His goal was not
         | to do another IPO.
         | 
         | I get that talking about things you don't actually understand
         | is perfectly human, but Monty's about 99% great guy pretty much
         | all the time. If you want to snipe, take aim at the one thing
         | he actually did wrong, instead of the things other people did
         | wrong with his babies.
        
       | INTPenis wrote:
       | I don't wanna get involved in the politics of it all, and yes I
       | love postgres too, I just want to say that Monty is a pretty cool
       | founder.
       | 
       | Several times I've come into their irc channel on libera and
       | asked some dumb question and Monty himself answers me. How many
       | other projects that have lived through an Oracle acquisition can
       | you say that about?
        
       | pachico wrote:
       | I have plans to migrate all our MariaDB RDS instances to MySQL.
       | AWS is heavily investing in MySQL (Aurora, even Serverless) while
       | for MariaDB there is hardly any news.
       | 
       | I'm sad, every time I do benchmarks for specific use cases,
       | MariaDB turns out to have better performance but we do need to
       | think about sustainability.
       | 
       | Sooner or later, we will say good bye to it.
        
       | 313 wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | hodgesrm wrote:
         | That's pretty good. Excuse the dumb question, but is that the
         | same Michael Howard that runs MariaDB?
         | 
         | If so, it just shows that you should always have another skill
         | you can fall back on, such as street musician. (Personally I'm
         | pretty handy at bagging groceries.)
        
           | dailydrudge wrote:
           | Yes that is him.
        
       | alfor wrote:
       | In 2023 what is the advantage of mariaDB/mysql vs Postgres?
        
         | MangoCoffee wrote:
         | its probably the install base. if you look at share webhosting,
         | most if not all offer MySql.
        
         | flas9sd wrote:
         | there are less dimensions in user/access management to grok, no
         | role privilege inheritance to think of. The public schema in
         | psql has a surprise for unsuspecting mysql converts. Easier
         | connection model. No vacuuming. Maxscale (by mariadb) is a good
         | addition.
         | 
         | Now you didn't ask for Postgres advantages but I know a lot
         | too, I like the choice and competition.
        
         | mrunkel wrote:
         | Whichever one you know is the one for you.
        
       | stefanos82 wrote:
       | People, relax please!
       | 
       | This is the company we are talking about, not the FOSS-ed
       | version.
       | 
       | If Microsoft has become a Platinum Sponsor for Azure support, you
       | have nothing to worry about; the MySQL team that moved to MariaDB
       | along with Monty will offer their support for you.
       | 
       | See the video by Monty near the end of
       | https://mariadb.org/donate/
        
         | avg_dev wrote:
         | > This entire article was written for one group of people.
         | 
         | >
         | 
         | > If you are employed at MariaDB, you absolutely need to be
         | scheduling interviews with other companies.
        
       | concerned_ wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | mardifoufs wrote:
       | I wonder if some distro repos will stop installing mariadb
       | instead of mysql whenever you try to install mysql. Always struck
       | me as a weird thing to do since mysql never stopped development.
       | (MariaDB.org seems to be still active, but there is now much more
       | uncertainty (imo) compared to the mysql project)
        
         | apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
         | At a glance, it seems like the open source MariaDB is just
         | fine. It's the commercial company that is dead/dying. This may
         | affect future development on the OSS side, but for now it seems
         | like there's no immediate danger.
         | 
         | As for why it's included over MySQL, it's undoubtedly the fact
         | that MySQL has been owned by Oracle since 2010. Oracle has not
         | been the most friendly to OSS communities in the past.
        
           | usrusr wrote:
           | You were probably talking only about the OSS side of that
           | particular RDBMS, but I believe that effect on OSS in general
           | might actually be even more interesting: taking a few years
           | of salaries from investors and then pack up when tensions
           | over postponing profitability reach uncomfortable levels? At
           | some point capital will start refusing to play that game.
           | 
           | This is supposed to be about "racism, sexism" and stuff like
           | that, but I don't necessarily see any contradiction. Because
           | it's not unheard of that in troubled companies, questionable
           | people rise to or stay in power that would not stand a chance
           | in a more healthy environment where better candidates don't
           | run away. Selection for the kind of person who'd rather be
           | captain on a sinking wreck than some lower officer on a well
           | run boat and I'd be surprised if there wasn't considerable
           | correlation between those and the scandal that's supposedly
           | the root cause here.
        
         | cesarb wrote:
         | > Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never
         | stopped development.
         | 
         | It makes sense if the distribution no longer includes mysql,
         | and the mysql the distribution included previously was from
         | before the fork: users who already had mysql installed would be
         | automatically migrated to a compatible replacement. It's the
         | same thing which happened with openoffice and libreoffice.
        
         | dspillett wrote:
         | _> Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never
         | stopped development._
         | 
         | It never stopped, but it did seem to stagnate a fair bit for a
         | while meaning that MariaDB trumped it on some features & fixes.
         | For instance CTE support arrived in stable releases about a
         | year earlier. That of course may not be the case any more.
        
           | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
           | Oracle seems to do large feature drops every few years, while
           | MariaDB has been shipping features incrementally every 6
           | months or so. The first couple of versions were the
           | exception: they pulled an enormous amount of functionality
           | from other forks, many of which have since been removed
           | (things like the TokuDB storage engine). Left a bit of a sour
           | taste in my mouth (how can you depend on a database that
           | shoves 50 features in, and then removes 20 of them during the
           | next few years).
           | 
           | We have low visibility into MySQL development process (is the
           | bug tracker still closed? I am not sure), so when they
           | shipped 8.0 in 2018 it was quite a surprise. They fixed a
           | number of outstanding issues, including many extremely bad
           | defaults (like using proper Unicode by default). Some things
           | added in 8.0 (like atomic DDL) are still not available in
           | MariaDB. Oracle being Oracle, there haven't been any major
           | releases since.
        
         | ilyt wrote:
         | It's literally "lesser evil", as MySQL is owned by Oracle now.
        
         | flas9sd wrote:
         | as a database engines fan, I am glad for mariadb to have been
         | the replacement in many distros. This way it got traction and
         | mariadb did interesting things the last few years. Oracle mysql
         | put out interesting releases with v8 again too. While I got hit
         | by some bugs in mariadb, I did also benefit. As long as core
         | developers aren't stranded or go outside sql/databases I don't
         | think there is a technical loss.
        
         | rubinlinux wrote:
         | > Always struck me as a weird thing to do since mysql never
         | stopped development.
         | 
         | What actually happened is more like they changed their name,
         | and sold the old name to Oracle. Oracle then forked and carried
         | on developing a new product under the old name, while the
         | original team carried on developing the old product under the
         | new name (mariadb).
         | 
         | That is why distros did what they did.
        
           | jzb wrote:
           | MySQL sold to Sun in 2008, which was then gobbled up by
           | Oracle in 2009.
           | 
           | MariaDB is the fork, technically speaking. The distro switch
           | took some time, probably in part because they wanted to wait
           | and see if MariaDB would be suitable / sustainable.
           | 
           | Fedora and openSUSE switched to MariaDB in 2013, in part due
           | to Oracle's license changes and changes to info published in
           | CVEs and because they were considered easier to work with.
           | (See: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-
           | announce/201...)
        
       | shapefrog wrote:
       | > the SPAC entity
       | 
       | I stopped reading right there - MariaDB (corp) went public via a
       | SPAC in Dec 2022. Hopefully this is nature healing itself and the
       | Corp entity goes to the wall and the Open Source foundation sheds
       | the parasite.
       | 
       | I also hope all the grifters involved wind up broke and homeless.
        
       | bastardoperator wrote:
       | I've always gravitated towards MySQL because I had the most
       | experience with. I recently started work with Supabase and
       | Postgres, I don't think I'll ever look back.
        
       | lbhdc wrote:
       | I was surprised when I saw them go public the other day. It
       | wasn't really clear to me what their business plan was. At the
       | time, I was still under the impression they had a bunch of spac
       | money, but I had a hard time seeing a path for them to keep those
       | coffers full. This seems like a mess.
        
       | ahofmann wrote:
       | Oof. What does this mean for us people using mariadb? Is there a
       | big company that uses mariadb enough, that the development of the
       | db is secured?
        
         | davidmichael wrote:
         | There are a number of large companies sponsoring MariaDB.org
         | development. I don't think there is any concern about its
         | development going forward at this point.
         | 
         | https://mariadb.org/donate/#corporate-sponsorships
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | nickstinemates wrote:
       | Working with Monty was the best part of working at MariaDB. Hope
       | he is doing well.
        
       | BonoboIO wrote:
       | Should i short the stock?
        
       | ilyt wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | joshmanders wrote:
         | Genuinely curious how much you've donated towards MySQL and
         | MariaDB if you feel so strongly about him not "selling out"..
         | 
         | My gut is telling me, much like everyone else who has similar
         | distaste towards people being paid for their work, absolutely
         | nothing.
        
         | Quarrel wrote:
         | Why should he have not sold it?
         | 
         | Why does it make him an asshole?
         | 
         | He's written two incredible open source tools, that are still
         | open source.
         | 
         | If someone then offers him some money to secure himself &
         | family, why should he ignore them?
        
         | daneel_w wrote:
         | Amazed how, when it at the time had by far the largest share of
         | global DB installations?
        
         | bewaretheirs wrote:
         | He sold to Sun Microsystems, not to Oracle.
         | 
         | Oracle then bought Sun.
        
       | wholinator2 wrote:
       | I guess i don't fully understand the distinction. So the company
       | is going down, but the open source org is still alive. Did the
       | company do most of the development? If they did was that
       | development available to people using it 'for free'? Why was
       | there a company in the first place, you'd think it would be hard
       | to make money betting on a single open source database.
       | 
       | My only interaction with MariaDB was picking it from a list of
       | possible RDS images because the description basically said,
       | "MySQL but better". Since i was paying AWS to run that service,
       | was there money going to the MariaDB corporation? Or was AWS
       | using the free open source one and pocketing the cash. I'm
       | definitely out of my depth here
        
         | that_guy_iain wrote:
         | I think MariaDB the company did the support contracts, probably
         | funded some development, and had some commerical products. They
         | had some of their own products because they created the
         | Business Source License[1] where code becomes open-source after
         | three years.
         | 
         | [1] - https://mariadb.com/bsl11/
        
         | madeofpalk wrote:
         | Does the original creator have a third kid to name the next
         | fork after?
        
           | wayne wrote:
           | You mean 4? The second kid's name was used for MaxDB, which
           | is used in the SAP world. :)
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
        
         | adduc wrote:
         | MariaDB Plc. appears to be the top contributor to MariaDB's
         | codebase (81.9% of commits since the beginning of 2020)[0].
         | 
         | [0]: https://mariadb.org/mariadb-contribution-statistics-
         | march-20...
        
           | tomxor wrote:
           | > MariaDB Plc. appears to be the top contributor to MariaDB's
           | codebase (81.9% of commits since the beginning of 2020)[0].
           | 
           | For context MariaDB existed before 2020, Before the Plc,
           | since 2009, and will continue to exist after.
        
       | felixgallo wrote:
       | Shades of Basho (rip). One wonders if there is a curse on open
       | source database companies. Maybe we could call it Data Gravity?
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | Postgres seems to be managing it pretty well.
         | 
         | The curse is on companies that decide to completely own some
         | popular open source program. If you are happy to just be
         | successful together with other people, you'll be fine.
        
         | assface wrote:
         | > Shades of Basho
         | 
         | Can you please explain? They just ran out of money. They never
         | did a SPAC.
        
           | felixgallo wrote:
           | https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/09/basho_damages_20m_mis.
           | ..
        
         | ilyt wrote:
         | ??? They were never even a popular database in the first place
        
         | sbuttgereit wrote:
         | I dunno... EnterpriseDB seems to be around year after year
         | without too much drama.
         | 
         | https://www.enterprisedb.com/
        
       | djha-skin wrote:
       | A lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt here. Of course the banks
       | backing out along with the founder is a bad sign. However,
       | quoting "they may expire worthless" from an SEC filing and citing
       | that as "evidence" is weak; SEC filings are full of what-if
       | scenarios. From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is _plenty_ of
       | runway for 100 people, even if it is a bit stiff for California.
       | I 'm not saying it won't shut down, but some of the specific
       | arguments about why its demise is coming didn't land with me.
        
         | zaidf wrote:
         | >From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway for
         | 100 people
         | 
         | LinkedIn shows ~350 employees with about half of them in the
         | US. $4.8 million is far from plenty to pay 300+ employees...not
         | counting lawyers.
        
         | tmpz22 wrote:
         | > From where I sit, $4.8 million in cash is plenty of runway
         | for 100 people,
         | 
         | 4.800.000 / 100 = $48,000 per person. For one year.
         | 
         | Not counting all other business expenses like servers. Laptops.
         | Slack. Zoom.
        
           | djha-skin wrote:
           | These numbers assume no revenue however.
        
             | tmpz22 wrote:
             | Are they going to attract a lot of big customers after this
             | news?
        
       | kramerger wrote:
       | This Michael Howard guy sounds like a greate dude...
       | 
       | What did he do before joining and crashing mariadb?
        
         | NelsonMinar wrote:
         | His LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-
         | howard-2b7b273/
         | 
         | He joined MariaDB 7 years ago, in 2015. Before then he hasC9 (A
         | SaaS company), Greenplum, EMC, 10 jobs in total. In the late
         | 90s he lists 4 years as "VP of data warehousing and integration
         | technologies" at Oracle.
        
       | fortran77 wrote:
       | What was the racism, sexism, and abuse at "MariaDB the Company"?
       | A search yields no drama.
        
         | justin_oaks wrote:
         | Have you tried asking ChatGPT? I'm sure it can come up with
         | something.
         | 
         | This is a reference to another HN item on the front page:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468540
        
       | T3RMINATED wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | npteljes wrote:
       | >This is yet another case of American corporatism failing the
       | open source world.
       | 
       | I believe that simply "This is yet another case of American
       | corporatism failing", full stop. It's a loophole in the system.
       | 
       | It's a good thing that MariaDB is open source, so that a failure
       | like this can't bring the product down.
        
         | hodgesrm wrote:
         | Could you be more specific about how American corporatism is
         | failing open source in this case? MariaDB PLC is not profitable
         | and most investors give it low chances of getting there. It's
         | currently trading at 25% of the IPO price which was already 40%
         | below the initial opening. [0, 1] (I hope I'm reading the
         | numbers correctly.)
         | 
         | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451
         | 
         | [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mariadb-announces-first-
         | quart...
        
       | habibur wrote:
       | RIP : MySQL of the 90s that made the dynamic web possible.
       | 
       | There were two options then. mSQL where you couldn't join between
       | two tables. And Postgress95 which crashed sometimes as soon as a
       | client connected.
       | 
       | MySQL had been a breath of fresh air.
        
         | joeatwork wrote:
         | Indeed - MySQL was fast, freely available, lightweight, and
         | "good enough" (and continually getting better) in an era when
         | the commercial competitors were ultraheavy, evil or broken (and
         | often all three). Pour one out for a real one.
        
       | Veen wrote:
       | This article twice makes accusations of "racism, sexism, and
       | abuse" without backing it up with facts. Is there any more
       | information about it in the public sphere? Or is it just: "These
       | things are bad and MariaDB is bad, so we'll say they did these
       | things".
       | 
       | It certainly seems like the company is going down the toilet, but
       | I'd be dubious about the motivations of an anonymous rant on
       | Medium about a publicly traded company.
        
         | creatonez wrote:
         | According to the thread on /r/mysql, the author used to work
         | there. So there is some credibility to the claims.
        
         | rwalle wrote:
         | Yeah, I was so turned off by this that I did not go much
         | further beyond the first paragraph. I mean, is this a rant or a
         | genuine effort to write a story? Why should I bother to read an
         | article that makes such strong accusations without providing
         | concrete evidence, and is the rest of the article is also
         | written in the same fashion?
        
         | jjulius wrote:
         | The only article referencing those claims that I could find
         | when Googling just now was this very article. Beyond that,
         | there is a Glassdoor page with negative reviews that suggest
         | the same.
        
           | tablespoon wrote:
           | > The only article referencing those claims that I could find
           | when Googling just now was this very article. Beyond that,
           | there is a Glassdoor page with negative reviews that suggest
           | the same.
           | 
           | I'm thinking those accusations are probably just slurs by
           | someone with a grudge.
           | 
           | I'm running into all kinds of paywalls with Glassdoor and I
           | don't want to register, but google searches make it look like
           | pretty much every company under the sun has a Glassdoor
           | review complaining of racism, sexism, etc. For instance this
           | one claims that _Apple_ is _homophobic_ , racist, sexist, and
           | "very Trumpian":
           | 
           | https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Apple-
           | RVW1...
        
             | mschuster91 wrote:
             | > I'm running into all kinds of paywalls with Glassdoor and
             | I don't want to register, but google searches make it look
             | like pretty much every company under the sun has a
             | Glassdoor review complaining of racism, sexism, etc. For
             | instance this one claims that Apple is homophobic, racist,
             | sexist, and "very Trumpian":
             | 
             | The larger the company, the larger that departments will
             | evolve their internal culture... and if team leads do not
             | take care to prevent discriminatory bullshit, it _will_
             | grow roots and fester.
             | 
             | Every so often, I read here or on Reddit the question "why
             | should companies involve themselves into kitchen room
             | talk?"... the answer is simple: failure to do so will
             | reflect _very_ negatively on your company 's image and thus
             | its hiring perspectives. When I search for hotels, Amazon
             | products, whatever - I don't go for the good reviews, I go
             | for the bad ones.
        
               | catiopatio wrote:
               | From your bio:
               | 
               | > _You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa"_
               | 
               | You're hardly representing an unbiased viewpoint, and
               | this isn't a problem Apple has.
        
               | mschuster91 wrote:
               | > You're hardly representing an unbiased viewpoint, and
               | this isn't a problem Apple has.
               | 
               | It absolutely _is_ a problem Apple has, judging by at
               | least three lawsuits which I could find in literally 30
               | seconds of Googling [1][2][3] - and it isn 't just recent
               | claims either, I could find one that went back to 2001
               | [4].
               | 
               | And yes, a lack of diversity in hiring can also lead to
               | other problems down the road, such as racial bias in
               | sensors [5].
               | 
               | All of these events could have been prevented by focusing
               | on an inclusive corporate culture.
               | 
               | [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-apple-lawyer-
               | lawsuit-...
               | 
               | [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/03/ap
               | pletoo-...
               | 
               | [3] https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/10/black-
               | employee-sues-...
               | 
               | [4] https://www.wired.com/2001/11/apple-hit-with-racial-
               | lawsuit/
               | 
               | [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2022/12/2
               | 9/apple...
        
               | tablespoon wrote:
               | > It absolutely is a problem Apple has, judging by at
               | least three lawsuits which I could find in literally 30
               | seconds of Googling [1][2][3] - and it isn't just recent
               | claims either, I could find one that went back to 2001
               | [4].
               | 
               | You're moving the goalposts. In your opinion, is being
               | "very Trumpian" a problem that Apple has? Is Tim Cook
               | running around in a MAGA hat and I totally did not
               | notice?
               | 
               | Edit: Regarding that 2001 article, it's just an article
               | about a lawsuit being _filed_ , which _anyone_ can do
               | whether they have a case or _not_. I haven 't yet found
               | that case, but I found a similar one from 2005 by an
               | apparently obese Black lesbian woman represented by the
               | same law firm:
               | 
               | Here's the trial order. Skimming it, it seems the
               | plaintiff was a terrible employee and her case was so bad
               | she and her lawyers were sanctioned for filing a
               | frivolous lawsuit:
               | 
               | https://casetext.com/case/patterson-v-apple-computer
               | 
               | > Burmeister offered plaintiff an opportunity to support
               | the Apple Hardware Engineering organization, believing
               | that this opportunity would give her a chance to showcase
               | her skills and build a base of support for her
               | clients.... This assignment was not successful.
               | Plaintiff's engineering clients, including Cheryl Smith
               | ("Smith"), an African-American HR Senior Director, found
               | plaintiff to be unresponsive, unhelpful, and rude. Smith
               | believed plaintiff had minimal interpersonal skills.
               | According to Smith, plaintiff frequently responded, "No,"
               | or "That's not my job," when Smith sought her assistance.
               | Plaintiff was also resistant to providing data on
               | bonuses, stating that the task was hard. Smith received
               | complaints from her HR team about plaintiff's attitude
               | and refusal to perform work. These problems caused Smith
               | ultimately to limit her interaction with Smith, and to
               | seek intervention from Burmeister.
               | 
               | > Judy Goodson ("Goodson"), another African-American HR
               | Director, found plaintiff to be often unavailable, rude,
               | disrespectful, and negative. To create an opportunity for
               | plaintiff, Goodson invited her to make a presentation to
               | a Senior Vice President and his staff. However, plaintiff
               | declined....
               | 
               | > According to plaintiff's colleague Deborah House
               | ("House"), plaintiff was frequently absent from
               | department staff meetings and quarterly HR Department
               | meetings. According to Burmeister, plaintiff was rude to
               | her colleagues in the Compensation Group, prompting
               | Burmeister to counsel her repeatedly about her
               | inappropriate tone, demeanor, and ability to work with
               | others and be a team player.
               | 
               | > Plaintiff's work day was also interrupted by ongoing
               | personal appointments and activities. She maintained a
               | standing weekly hair appointment during working hours.
               | Starting in February 2002, she commenced weekly sessions
               | with a psychologist whose office was in Oakland,
               | approximately 60 miles from Apple's Cupertino offices.
               | She also spent up to and hour and a half a day trading
               | her personal stock portfolio, and at other times played
               | video games and did crossword puzzles on her computer.
               | 
               | > Plaintiff believed she was entitled to yearly merit
               | increases and promotions. However, Apple had a salary
               | freeze in effect from the time plaintiff was hired until
               | late 2003. Thus, the first opportunity for plaintiff to
               | receive a merit increase was in connection with the
               | review cycle in November 2003. When plaintiff learned
               | that she was not receiving a merit increase, she accessed
               | two Apple databases during work hours to obtain
               | confidential salary and tenure information regarding
               | certain of her colleagues....
               | 
               | > Subsequently, as part of the investigation, plaintiff
               | met with Parker and Hull. Plaintiff confirmed that she
               | had accessed and reviewed her manager's and co-workers'
               | salaries and confidential information independent of any
               | business reason. She considered it appropriate to access
               | the information, and admitted that she had distributed
               | the information to her attorney and therapist. She also
               | confirmed that she had chosen to use a personal laptop
               | for her work at Apple, and therefore possessed
               | confidential Apple information on that laptop. At the
               | conclusion of the meeting, Parker told plaintiff she was
               | suspended with pay pending the outcome of the
               | investigation....
               | 
               | > On November 18, 2003, plaintiff filed a charge of
               | discrimination with the EEOC (charge No. 377-2004-00145),
               | alleging discrimination on the basis of race, and
               | retaliation for engaging in protected activities.
               | 
               | > The court finds that the motion must be GRANTED.
               | Plaintiff has provided no facts to support the racial
               | harassment claim against Walker, failed to state any
               | factual or legal basis for the retaliation claim or the
               | defamation claim against Walker, and stated no facts
               | showing that her invasion of privacy claim was well-
               | grounded in fact or law. On more than one occasion,
               | defendants put plaintiff on notice that her claims
               | against Walker were frivolous, but plaintiff persisted...
               | 
               | > The court awards defendants $5,000 in sanctions against
               | plaintiff and her counsel, the Law Offices of Waukeen Q.
               | McCoy.
        
               | mschuster91 wrote:
               | > You're moving the goalposts. In your opinion, is being
               | "very Trumpian" a problem that Apple has? Is Tim Cook
               | running around in a MAGA hat and I totally did not
               | notice?
               | 
               | I never set goalposts to begin with ffs. The post my
               | original reply was aimed at claimed that:
               | 
               | > > I'm thinking those accusations are probably just
               | slurs by someone with a grudge.
               | 
               | To which I replied that essentially every organization
               | will have bad apples and it's good corporate governance
               | to weed these bad apples out.
               | 
               | Then, in response to someone else thinking it might be a
               | civilized idea to claim I might be biased in favor of
               | anti-discrimination, I listed sources proving a decades-
               | long history of Apple teams and leadership being
               | independently accused of discrimination because
               | apparently one needs to prove what should be common
               | sense, and now you come on and accuse me of moving
               | goalposts? WTF?
               | 
               | > Edit: Regarding that 2001 article, it's just an article
               | about a lawsuit being filed, which anyone can do whether
               | they have a case or not. I haven't yet found that case,
               | but I found a similar one from 2005:
               | 
               | Just saw your edit as well. Yes, people can feel free to
               | file whatever claims they want, but the key thing is that
               | there is a _pattern_ of allegations. It is the very
               | nature of discrimination claims that they are excessively
               | hard to prove unless you have recordings or someone
               | willing to act as a witness and burn themselves along
               | with you on blacklists.
        
               | catiopatio wrote:
               | You're exhibiting exactly the kind of "bad apple"
               | behavior that organizations must weed out to stay healthy
               | -- not unlike the people that filed those frivolous
               | lawsuits and ridiculous public claims.
               | 
               | You're primed to see your ideological enemies hiding
               | everywhere, and so you do.
        
               | tablespoon wrote:
               | > Just saw your edit as well. Yes, people can feel free
               | to file whatever claims they want, but the key thing is
               | that there is a pattern of allegations. It is the very
               | nature of discrimination claims that they are excessively
               | hard to prove unless you have recordings or someone
               | willing to act as a witness and burn themselves along
               | with you on blacklists.
               | 
               | I don't know if you saw my subsequent edit (and long
               | quotes from the court), but the case I found was
               | frivolous.
               | 
               | A "pattern of allegations" doesn't prove anything if the
               | allegations are lies. People lie all the time. They can
               | even _lie to themselves_ and convince themselves they
               | were wronged to avoid dealing with their own problems.
        
               | KyeRussell wrote:
               | Forgive me for hesitating to trust some HN rando's
               | assertion that a big tech company *doesn't^ have white
               | boy culture issues.
        
               | marcellus23 wrote:
               | Terms like "white boy culture issues" are a bit below the
               | (admittedly low) standard of discourse on this site.
        
         | hintymad wrote:
         | > "racism, sexism, and abuse" without backing it up with facts.
         | 
         | Yeah, I was turned off by this too. Unfortunately this is the
         | psyche of the western world. You disagree with me? You're
         | racist. You think bias in an ML model comes from bias in data.
         | You're a bigot. Such accusation works and LeCun apologizes.
        
           | creatonez wrote:
           | This is not "the psyche of the western world", this is a
           | ridiculous caricature you came up with.
        
       | eis wrote:
       | This is the second time that Monty left a company that he had no
       | control over even though it was his software "baby" that the
       | company was selling. At least the first time he made some good
       | money. But I'm not sure if that is the case this time.
       | 
       | Third time's the charm? Monty you should retain control over the
       | companies that you want to sell your product under. If you don't
       | control over 50% then it's not "your company" anymore.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | Maybe he has enough money to be comfortable and should just
         | work on a non-profit doing database things.
        
         | PeterZaitsev wrote:
         | After leaving Sun Monty in fact started Monty Programming AB -
         | company he started based on "Hacking Business Models"
         | https://hbm.mariadb.org/
         | 
         | It was really company "ran by engineers" focused on developers.
         | Later though he merged with "SkySQL" and the company became
         | MariaDB Corporation
        
         | robocat wrote:
         | > If you don't control over 50%
         | 
         | Founders will virtually always lose control once they hop on
         | the investor conveyor belt. It can happen as soon as Round A
         | e.g. VC wants 25% with 10% option pool and seed investors owns
         | 15% (say due to carry along provisions) - et voila - founder
         | diluted to 50%! It often is inevitable as soon as a founder
         | takes seed money because (a) if you must take seed you probably
         | need future cash for competitive growth, and (b) seed investors
         | define expectation of future VC rounds (e.g. YC demo day). The
         | well known exceptions where founders retained control are
         | outliers.
         | 
         | Furthermore, founders are third class because investors get
         | first class preferential shares. Preferential shares have a
         | variety of powerful benefits over common shares - including
         | rights to oust the founders (under conditions that will usually
         | occur: VCs take advantage of the natural optimism of founders).
         | 
         | Even worse: the game is systematically rigged against founders,
         | because VCs are "the house" and have been setting up the rules
         | while playing multiple games for decades, but it is usually a
         | founders first game. Bacon and egg breakfast: where the
         | founders are the fully committed pigs providing the bacon, but
         | the investors are chickens providing the eggs. 10 years of life
         | is one hock. If a founder wins a game and want to play again,
         | then a founder often starts their own casino by doing seed
         | rounds. Sometimes a successful founder can afford to start a
         | new business without using VC investment (self-invests).
         | 
         | VC capital can be a drug worth taking if you fully manage your
         | risks. Just beware that the industry rule-of-thumb is that 90%
         | of the time a founder has an expected payout of approximately
         | $0.
         | 
         | The YCombinator casino is a bit of an exception because they
         | better understand how much a founder is worth so they help
         | founders play games with other casinos. But you still can't
         | argue that your sweat equity should be equally worth dollars
         | invested: a software developer taking a $100k paycut for the
         | first year of a startup should receive $100k of preferential
         | shares - but I have never heard of that happening. Subtle game
         | play.
        
       | geenat wrote:
       | Bit of a nail in the coffin for me as of late.
       | 
       | * No async drivers.
       | 
       | * Total freezeup bug that only appears when MariaDB is under high
       | load, since mid-2021 (10.6), not yet addressed.
       | 
       | * Postgres 15 outperforming MariaDB in both my own SELECT and
       | INSERT benchmarks. Up to double performance for INSERT.
       | 
       | * Less and less compatibility with MySQL. Vitess dropping
       | MariaDB.
       | 
       | * Postgres has a lighter setup, super fast compile in 2023.
       | Standalone / portable Postgres is amazing:
       | https://gist.github.com/gnat/cfe3754c3dc817c7fb8b2225ef4db62...
       | 
       | I do enjoy the MariaDB / MySQL tooling and syntax way more as a
       | developer, and MaxScale etc. seems good, but there's only so much
       | BS i'm willing to deal with when Postgres exists.
        
         | codr7 wrote:
         | Postgres was the first relational database I came into contact
         | with, Interbase the second and Oracle the third.
         | 
         | Lately I've been writing a REST back end on top of MariaDB at
         | work, and I swear it's going to drive me insane with its
         | arbitrary limitations.
         | 
         | At least SQLite offers something in return that Postgres can't
         | do.
        
           | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
           | > At least SQLite offers something in return that Postgres
           | can't do.
           | 
           | If you're going to throw allegations around, at least get
           | your facts straight. MariaDB and MySQL support complex
           | replication topologies out of the box, including multi-
           | master. Yes, it does come in useful if implemented correctly:
           | we built a business application for a particular setup with
           | many branches around the country, many of which have very
           | unreliable network and must be able to continue working with
           | a local database when that network is not available. It has
           | been running for 4-5 years without issues.
           | 
           | They're also much easier to support: for example, upgrades
           | are handled automatically -- no need to dump and restore or
           | resort to weird tricks; you can easily upgrade through ten
           | major versions just by installing the latest version and
           | restarting the daemon.
           | 
           | Some other features off the top of my mind: compression
           | (zlib, lz4, lzo, zstd), versioned tables (an absolute life-
           | saver if you need audit).
        
             | mschuster91 wrote:
             | > we built a business application for a particular setup
             | with many branches around the country, many of which have
             | very unreliable network and must be able to continue
             | working with a local database when that network is not
             | available. It has been running for 4-5 years without
             | issues.
             | 
             | How do you deal with reconciling after a connection loss?
             | Is your client application read-only / the data sharded in
             | a way that it doesn't matter for other branches if one
             | branch is offline?
        
           | TylerE wrote:
           | If you think that's bad, you weren't around for the MYiASM (I
           | think it was.. days).
           | 
           | Yeah, for years, MySQL shipped with a default storage format
           | that _didn 't enforce constraints_.
        
             | dakna wrote:
             | To be fair,in those days MyISAM was pretty much the only DB
             | engine that could keep up with the traffic growth rates of
             | the early web, because it didn't enforce constraints. It
             | was optimized for reads, not writes, and was fast enough to
             | hold all state in one DB server for heavy traffic sites.
             | Combined with stateless PHP and memory caching it was the
             | best tool to use for this use case.
             | 
             | That it wasn't the best engine for all use cases and also
             | corrupted data on disk occasionally is a different story.
             | Once InnoDb was ready, you could just mix and match engines
             | in one DB server as far as I remember and use referential
             | constraints where needed.
             | 
             | Later MongoDB marketed itself as "web scale" due to no
             | schema constraints at all. Fun times.
        
         | zinclozenge wrote:
         | What kind of tooling does MariaDB/MySQL have that you miss when
         | using Postgres? I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the
         | ecosystem as I am with Postgres.
        
           | mschuster91 wrote:
           | > What kind of tooling does MariaDB/MySQL have that you miss
           | when using Postgres?
           | 
           | Easy upgrades? With MySQL it has never been more involved
           | than running apt-get dist-upgrade/docker rm mysql && docker
           | run mysql/kubectl deploy, depending on the stack. Downtimes
           | of less than two minutes.
           | 
           | In contrast, PostgreSQL is such a hassle to upgrade that I
           | only do it when forced to by an application dropping support
           | for the current major version.
        
             | Conan_Kudo wrote:
             | This 100%. I love PostgreSQL, but I rolled out MariaDB for
             | my personal servers because I like not spending time doing
             | weird things for upgrading the database software.
        
           | nophunphil wrote:
           | Not tooling, but the big one for me is the ability to reorder
           | columns via ALTER statements.
        
           | JeremyNT wrote:
           | I'm curious too, but my suspicion is that it's "the devil you
           | know" at play here.
           | 
           | If you work with a tech for long enough you get the tooling
           | "figured out" and things can feel like second nature. Maybe
           | some alternative has equally "good" tooling (for however you
           | define "good") but it may have slightly different quirks,
           | strengths, and weaknesses. The fact that you have to figure
           | that stuff out is itself a negative.
        
       | jjluoma wrote:
       | I would like to know more about those insurances, have they
       | bought new ones? If so, are those really going to cover anything
       | at all they would like to be covered? If there has been
       | negligence, breach of duty or breach of trust in the past, why
       | would a new insurance cover those?
        
       | NelsonMinar wrote:
       | Another SPAC story.
        
       | bratao wrote:
       | I'm very sad that MariaDB is in this state. MySQL it still a very
       | powerful database. For someone looking for alternatives, I
       | recommend the Percona Distribution of MySQL.
       | https://www.percona.com/software/mysql-database/percona-serv...
        
         | daneel_w wrote:
         | It's the commercial limb that has developed gangrene, not the
         | software, not its founder, nor the developers. The software is
         | (so far) not in any immediate danger.
        
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