
European Investment Bank announces €25M funding for MariaDB - hpaavola
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/katainen/announcements/investment-plan-europe-eur-25-million-support-mariadbs-development-new-software_en
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mathnode
Good for mariadb and a good eye opener for any EU government system that is
stuck on oracle.

Mariadb 10.3 is going to be a haven (or rehab) for oracle veterans.

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-
mariadb-103/#compa...](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-
mariadb-103/#compatibility)

~~~
sz4kerto
> stuck on oracle.

What is the problem with Oracle except the price?

edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.

~~~
threeseed
It's all about the price. The database is largely irrelevant.

I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of
them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but
because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a
giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission
critical data in the EDW.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're
pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra

~~~
coredog64
We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they
were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS.

CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more
constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term
workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project.
The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what
would seem to be trivial use cases.

I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.

~~~
smueller1234
We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node
clusters without outside consulting.

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gotchange
Slightly off-topic, what caught my attention was how the firm developing
MariaDB is Finnish while one of the top leadership* who approved the agreement
is Finnish too.

*: European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen, responsible for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness

~~~
ptman
That's exactly the kind of corruption we have in "the least corrupted country
in the world" (maybe not this year, but pretty close). No money changes hands,
but if you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. It's all about who you
know

~~~
gotchange
I am not saying anything but this looks like good old "pork barrel politics"
to me.

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shimon_e
I've seen multiple open source projects get such government funding. Does
anyone know the process that they go through to get such grants?

~~~
mkesper
For this program, look here: [http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-
efsi-financin...](http://www.eib.org/efsi/how-does-a-project-get-efsi-
financing/index.htm#) There's also a map of funded projects (most not software
projects, as far as I can see):
[http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm](http://www.eib.org/efsi/map/index.htm)

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Arwill
I'm wondering what will prevent that open source project from being sold (like
MySQL was)? The prospect of having a stable open source database engine is
nice, but then it gets sold to a big corporation (Oracle in case of MySQL),
and gets killed off (presumable to push paying customers towards their own
DB). The original developers leave the project, development and maintenance
stalls, and whoever was using the DB freely, now has to transition to
something else.

So now MariaDB gets this funding, they might just as well work on the product
for couple of years, build up user and paying customer base, and then sell it
off. If i were giving grants as a government entity, i would consider adding a
condition to the deal that they can't sell the software and have to keep it
open-source and free.

~~~
mdcallag
MySQL has done great since Oracle acquired Sun -- regular & high-quality
releases, new features, tech debt reduction.

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tosh
Would love to see this for Datomic.

~~~
oblio
The EIB invests in EU projects or in developing countries. Datomic/Cognitect
seems to be based on the East Coast, so it doesn't seem like EIB investment
material.

It does look like VC material, though :)

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roel_v
What are the terms of such a loan? Has anyone reading this bothered to look
deeper?

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davidgerard
The actual press release:

[https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/kata...](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/commissioners/2014-2019/katainen/announcements/investment-
plan-europe-eur-25-million-support-mariadbs-development-new-software_en)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we updated the link from [http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press-
release_MEX-17-1244_en.htm) a little while ago.

