Who is behind MariaDB?

The MariaDB project is the brainchild of Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL® and Monty Program Ab.

The core team consists of developers hired by Monty Program Ab, some partners of Monty Program, and people in the MariaDB community. MariaDB is a technocracy, and we want our core membership to reflect this.

Monty Program Ab's role is to be a steward of the MariaDB project. Monty Program Ab also takes the responsibility of keeping the quality of the MariaDB project high. Monty Program Ab is owned by its employees and its core business is to develop and take care of MariaDB.

A current list of active core contributors (maria-captains) can be found on Launchpad. Anyone with enough technical skill level who wants to actively participate in the development of MariaDB can be part of this team. You don't have to work at Monty Program Ab to be able to participate or commit code!

There is an active community around MariaDB that you can be part of. Their developer contributions can be found on the log of MariaDB contributors.

Monty:

There have been some questions if MariaDB is a company or a community open source project. We, at Monty Program Ab, regard MariaDB as a community open source project because:

• All code in MariaDB is open source. Monty Program Ab does not and does not intend to release any closed source modules to MariaDB, as can be seen by our commitment to the community.
• Anyone who matches the criteria of a MariaDB captain can get commit rights to the MariaDB code base. There are many people outside of Monty Program Ab among them.
• Anyone can contribute articles to the askmonty.org knowledge base with very few restrictions.
• Monty Program Ab owns the trademark of MariaDB, but we intend to give broad rights to it to others. We are working on a public trademark policy and it will be released shortly.

As has been commented by others, it's true that askmonty.org and mariadb.org contain more information about Monty Program Ab than about other entities working on MariaDB. This is what is to be expected as long as Monty Program Ab is the most active contributor to these sites as it's easier to write information about what we do and know than about others and we don't have unlimited resources to do everything. Over time as more people start to contribute to MariaDB this will change.