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Announcement regarding possible offer

investors.mariadb.com

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Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#71
post #52
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised the employees aren't making a buy out offer at this point. I'd love to own a reasonable fraction of the company I work for at that sort of price and would happily throw in some of my savings.

Pumping my savings into a struggling company so that when it eventually fails I'm not only unemployed but also out of savings? That's a concentration risk I wouldn't want to have if I were a MariaDB employee.

The key words are “reasonable” and “concentration risk”.

Companies not run by shareholders but employees are often unremarkable but do well in long term. From time to time family owned companies choose that path.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#72
post #33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trading at a market cap of around $31 million, which is below even its revenue. Could make sense to buy it, improve operating metrics, and then flip it. (Or buy it, make it profitable, and earn a return that way.)

I'm surprised the employees aren't making a buy out offer at this point. I'd love to own a reasonable fraction of the company I work for at that sort of price and would happily throw in some of my savings.

MariaDB is out of cash and losing $12 million per quarter.

Would you also throw in your savings next quarter to pay for the new losses? And the next quarter? And after that?

Paying $30M today isn’t enough when the business is making heavy losses and nearly out of money. You need to have a plan to either raise a lot more money very soon, cut costs, or probably both. Employees aren’t well positioned to do either.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is mentioning Postgres as a counterpoint.

The way they wrote a full sentence, that seems to be about Postgres, before introducing the word "Postgres" in the second sentence, does make it appear like they were confused and thought this thread was about that. (As the other logical reading would be that the first sentence is complimenting MariaDB before switching tack for sentence two. What they needed to do to not cause the confusion was to start with "Meanwhi…

I took it as a way to intentionally misdirect the reader and then subvert their expectations. In other words, a joke.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#74
post #67

Hah, so MariaDB was created because the creator of MySQL got pissed about the acquisition by Sun/Oracle, and now MariaDB might be acquired as well? Making bank while forking their project over and over isn't a bad way to make a living it seems.

I am so confused, for the lay person - can someone explain how does something with a copy-left license the GPL end up in this situation of being "acquired"? We can just fork it right? I have lately been wondering if culture has forgotten how to run any organisation apart from a for profit corporation or a KPI driven NGO. E.g. an association, a co-operative etc. These all require collaboration and entrepreneurship and…

GPL is what allowed Monty to fork after selling the MySQL trademark and copyright to Oracle. So Monty lost the ability to dual license, yet gained much money. Arguably with GPL2 he could even fork with proprietary plugins created later. Or he may have negotiated a backroom deal with Oracle to keep some relicensing rights.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original way of making money with FOSS that folks like Hashicorp and InfluxData fail to understand while they push for unicorn status.

> The original way of making money with FOSS But at risk because a large company can offer the support as part of a larger offering. For example, if you were a large company on AWS or Azure, would you rather get your MySQL/MariaDB support through MariaDb or through Amazon/Microsoft?

I think I'd want support from the people who wrote the software.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#76
post #73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way they wrote a full sentence, that seems to be about Postgres, before introducing the word "Postgres" in the second sentence, does make it appear like they were confused and thought this thread was about that. (As the other logical reading would be that the first sentence is complimenting MariaDB before switching tack for sentence two. What they needed to do to not cause the confusion was to start with "Meanwhi…

I took it as a way to intentionally misdirect the reader and then subvert their expectations. In other words, a joke.

I took it as it was written, word by word.

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#77

Hah, so MariaDB was created because the creator of MySQL got pissed about the acquisition by Sun/Oracle, and now MariaDB might be acquired as well? Making bank while forking their project over and over isn't a bad way to make a living it seems.

There was an anonymous post complaining about mariadb.com, the company a few months back. Never saw the claims anywhere else though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3546

Re: Announcement regarding possible offer

#79
post #73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way they wrote a full sentence, that seems to be about Postgres, before introducing the word "Postgres" in the second sentence, does make it appear like they were confused and thought this thread was about that. (As the other logical reading would be that the first sentence is complimenting MariaDB before switching tack for sentence two. What they needed to do to not cause the confusion was to start with "Meanwhi…

I took it as a way to intentionally misdirect the reader and then subvert their expectations. In other words, a joke.

> I took it as a way to intentionally misdirect the reader and then subvert their expectations.

can confirm

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