What license does MariaDB use?

MariaDB is available under the terms of the GPL v2 license, just like MySQL.

Some parts of the code use the BSD license or are public domain. See the header files for details.

We are working on creating a LGPL library C client library that will be binary compatible with the current one. In the mean time you can find an old LGPL client library here.

If you want to be part of the MariaDB community and donate code to the MariaDB project, then you need to give the code to the project under BSD-NEW or sign and email the Monty Program Contributor Agreement. The reason for this is that we want to be able to give code to others that may not be able to use the code under GPL, for example to the MySQL project under Oracle.