Towards a healthy ecosystem

A healthy ecosystem around MariaDB Server involves an active community. Lots of happy code contributors cause fast development of new functionality, as well as increased adoption by users. Users see the vibrancy of the contributor space as a sign of health, rightfully so. Hence, preventive health care “with daily exercise and good eating habits” is high on the agenda of MariaDB Foundation.

But in practice, improving MariaDB’s habits around code development is about as easy as improving individual life habits in general, particularly if you are under public scrutiny. Let me here share a few thoughts on our progress, and solicit some input.

First, MariaDB Foundation has openness as one of its three key values in our mission statement. It’s also a commonly accepted value, which in principle has all of us working on MariaDB Server pulling in the same direction. That’s a good thing, but openness is also a fluffy word that people put different meanings into. 

Second, Amazon AWS is a much appreciated newcomer into the MariaDB developer ecosystem. Ok, “newcomer” is a relative concept, since AWS has been actively contributing well over a year – as witnessed by our Chief Contribution Officer Andrew Hutchings’ quarterly overviews. 

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