SkySQL's CEO Patrick Sallner, Percona's co-founder Peter Zaitsev and MySQL AB co-founders Michael "Monty" Widenius, David Axmark and Allan Larsson have come together to announce the creation of the MariaDB Foundation. "The time is right for an independent organisation to safeguard the interests of MariaDB users and developers as we head towards MariaDB 10", said Axmark. According to the announcement made at the Percona Live conference in London, the organisation has secured a pledge of one million euros from the foundations two initial sponsors and is seeking other sponsors.

The new foundation will be based in the US and has applied for US 501(C)(3) status. It will appoint board members in February 2013 but until then there will be three interim officers of the foundation; Andrew Katz will be COO and Legal Counsel, Widenius will be CTO and Niall McCarthy will handle Foundation Development.

The mission statement for the MariaDB Foundation will be to improve database technology, a remit which includes standards implementation, interoperability and bridging to other database technology such as transactional and NoSQL platforms. It appears that the foundation will take on the work of reviewing, merging, testing and releasing the MariaDB product suite and provide the infrastructure for the MariaDB project. Widenius says he is looking forward to a new autonomous foundation noting that "MariaDB exists thanks to the strength of the GPL and the efforts of the organisations who defend it, such as our friends at the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Free Software Foundation Europe".

(djwm)