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Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

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Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#61

Post by theduncan »

jordanlev wrote: post #59
ppeetteerr wrote: post #38

Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

Yeah, would be better if a US company like Oracle were in charge of it ;) (Not agreeing or disagreeing with you, just kind of funny/ironic that we're talking about a fork of an open source project that exists because of disagreement with the steward of MySQL... if Alibaba negatively impacts MariaDB, couldn't we just then move on to another fork. MylantaDB anyone?)

I don't know if Monty has anymore kids to name databases after.

Monty is the one who first created MySQL, and later foked MySQL to create MariaDB. There is also MaxDB, but it looks to be a SAP product.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#62

Post by throwawaymanbot »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #38

Any time I hear that a Chinese company is investing in a product I use, it's as if the Chinese government is now part owner of it as well. This may be general paranoia, but given the latest crackdown on VPNs and privacy, I don't know that I want a foreign government with a significant stake in Alibaba have access to direct the future of MariaDB. Is anyone else feeling this?

No not feeling it. Its a database technology. Ali Baba was part owned by yahoo wasn't it? Anyway the code is at least open source. It can be vetted.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#63

Post by throwayit »

yeukhon wrote: post #53
mmanfrin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the biggest creditor to the US national debt Uh, no it ain't. Not even close. Domestic funds are the lions share, with Social Security Trust holding 2.5x what China does (2.8t vs 1.1t).

Uh, excuse me, can you check this? http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/16/investing/china-us-debt-trea... Do you want me to be more precise? Foreign creditor? "The Treasury Department has ranked China as the biggest foreign creditor to the U.S. for the overwhelming majority of the past nine years. "

I think the OP wanted to make clear that domestic creditors far outweigh any foreign one so saying "biggest creditor" was a deceptive statement.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#65

Post by snowman311 »

Just looked through the Crunchbase profiles of a few Western SQL/NoSQL database companies, and I did not see any Chinese investors. This investment will certainly give MariaDB a significant competitive advantage in China. It will be interesting to see if other startups follow their strategy.

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#66

Post by johansch »

jamesblonde wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #19

Wow. Monty made a cool billion from Sun. Why does he need external investors now? How can MariaDB possibly have blown through that epic fortune?

He only made 300m. Us other MySQL employees (about 250) shared crumbs for that purchase (VPs excepted). He screwed us, but he never had respect for us - "people are lazy and greedy" ( https://www.pythian.com/blog/mysql-ceo-marten-mickos-intervi... ) . Then he promised he would fix the mistake he made with Maria by being more generous. Ha.

Sad to hear that. Being an employee mostly sucks in Sweden.

(If you put some (throwaway?) contact email in your profile I'd be interested to trade stories/old gossip via phone over the weekend; it seems like we worked in similar markets over similar times.)

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#67

Post by stephenr »

osrec wrote: post #37

Really very happy about this. I would love for MariaDB to outpace MySQL in terms of features, as I'm never quite sure which direction Oracle will take with MySQL (especially in terms of licensing)!

It’s ironic in a tragic way that people fear monger about Oracle changing the MySQL license (which has not changed from before Monty sold it to Sun) and advocate for a fork operated by a company that shits on the very concept of open source.

If the MariaDB MaxScale licensing bullshittery didn’t make you think twice about relying on MariaDB, why do you worry about Oracle?

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#69

Post by gnbfrdjng »

finnh wrote: post #43
gnbfrdjng wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the concrete concern be in this case? Any backdoor would destroy the company brand and be excised immediately in a fork. I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.

> excised immediately Only if the backdoor is obvious. I doubt they would introduce a backdoor that reads `if ($PWD = "supersecretbackdoorpwd") loginAs("root");` But a subtle buffer overrun resulting in a 0day that's only obvious to the writers - that's much more likely. Check out the Underhanded C contest for examples of ways exploits can hide in plain sight. EDIT: I'm not saying that's what going to happen with Ali…

The backdoor would either be obvious (ie make outgoing connections) or it would have debatable value (maybe a killswitch?)

Re: Alibaba is leading a $27M investment in MariaDB

#70

Post by gnbfrdjng »

mtgx wrote: post #45
gnbfrdjng wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the concrete concern be in this case? Any backdoor would destroy the company brand and be excised immediately in a fork. I suspect they’ll treat it like a piece of critical infrastructure; their political concerns would be at the gfw level, and I just don’t see the likelihood of weaponized attacks. Databases are usually locked down for egress and any outgoing attempts would be rapidly detected.

Lenovo seems to get caught with a backdoor every 6 months or so lately. Although I do think that has tainted its brand, I think it's still pretty far off from "destroying the brand".

Lenovo doesn’t make databases.
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