The MariaDB Foundation, stewards of the community-maintained open source MariaDB database that is sweeping the Internet, announced today the next steps towards a community-managed governance structure. With the appointment of a new, enlarged Board of Directors and a new interim chief executive, the MariaDB Foundation is now on track to a fully member-led governance in the second half of 2013.

The Board members are now Rasmus Johansson, Andrew Katz, Simon Phipps, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and Jeremy Zawodny. The first act of the new interim Board was to appoint Johansson as Chair and Phipps as Secretary and Chief Executive Officer.

The Board bring together a wealth of experience. Johansson is an experienced leader within the MariaDB developer community. Katz is a well-known expert in open source legal matters and has been acting as COO of the Foundation until now. Phipps brings experience of IBM and Sun Microsystems as well as leadership in non-profit organisations such as the Open Source Initiative. Widenius is a veteran of the MariaDB and MySQL projects, having founded both. Zawodny is a long-time implementer of solutions using both the MySQL and MariaDB databases; he is currently at Craigslist and was formerly at Yahoo.

The interim Board plans to adopt a membership-based governance model that includes a diversity of stakeholders, similar to that used by the Eclipse Foundation, so has invited its Executive Director Mike Milinkovich to directly advise on governance matters. The Board aims to devise and publicly review suitable governance rules between now and July and then to have MariaDB Foundation members and contributors elect a new Board using those rules.

The Foundation invites companies wishing to contribute to the success of the MariaDB database project to contact them. Opportunities both for sponsorship and for engagement in the governance of the new Foundation are available. Please contact foundation at the mariadb org domain.

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