The Business of Open Source3 Huhti 2024

Nailing Customer Acquisition with Patrick Backman of MariaDB and OpenOcean

This week, I had a dilemma: should I prioritize the episode where I spoke with one of the MariaDB co-founders, in which we discuss setting up a foundation as a way to ensure that the project continues to be open source in the future, no matter what (relevant given the Redis announcement); or should I prioritize the conversation with one of the founders of Sonatype, one of the oldest companies in the software supply chain security space, in which we talk about the xz debacle.

I went with Patrick Backman, general partner at OpenOcean and co-founder of MariaDB, because it’s a little more in my lane. (The conversation with Brian Fox will have to wait for next week!).

One of the main things we discussed was the relationship between the MariaDB foundation and the MariaDB company. Including:

Why they decided to put MariaDB open source in a foundation, and why they created a separate foundation instead of putting it in an existing foundation
The relationship between MariaDB foundation and company today, including the financial relationship

MariaDB was founded by the founders (and some key employees) at MySQL; we also discussed the lessons learned at MySQL that the team then applied at MariaDB. And we talked about customer acquisition, one of the things that Patrick thinks the team had learned at MySQL and therefore had pretty well figured it out at MariaDB.

Patrick’s co-founder Monty Widenius is one of the speakers at Open Source Founders Summit — if you want to go into more details on with the lessons from MySQL and MariaDB, as well as lessons from being an investor at OpenOcean, join us in Paris May 27th and 28th at Open source Founders Summit.

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