Anna Widenius

Governance Is Infrastructure: Building a Healthy Open Source Database Ecosystem

Forks are one of open source's most powerful mechanisms. They are also the beginning of a much harder question: what happens next? Seventeen years after MariaDB emerged from MySQL, MariaDB and MySQL are parts of a much larger database ecosystem that also includes cloud providers, distributions, tooling companies, application frameworks, commercial vendors and thousands of individual contributors and users. Some interests overlap. Some compete. Many organisations depend on more than one part of that ecosystem. So what makes such an ecosystem sustainable? In this talk, Anna Widenius, CEO of MariaDB Foundation, will use MariaDB's experience to explore the relationship between governance and ecosystem health: who gets to make technical decisions, how responsibility is earned, how a project can remain open when major contributors are employed by commercial companies, and why making those rules visible matters to contributors and companies deciding whether to invest in an open-source project. She will also look beyond project governance itself at compatibility, extensibility, integrations and the role of independent ecosystem companies. The goal is not a world in which one member of the MySQL family wins and the others disappear. A healthy open-source ecosystem can support competition, differentiation and collaboration at the same time. The question for the next generation of the MySQL ecosystem is therefore larger than which server gains which feature. It is how we create enough openness, trust and room for innovation that more people and companies choose to build on it.