The MariaDB foundation has announced the appointment of a new Board of Directors and a new interim chief executive. The board members include Rasmus Johansson, Andrew Katz, Simon Phipps, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and Jeremy Zawodny. The interim board has appointed Johansson as Chair and Phipps as Secretary and Chief Executive Officer. Colin Charles says, "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." Charles further writes:

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.

MariaDB is fast replacing MySQL, which under Oracle's leadership is being criticized for becoming a closed project. The foundation is inviting companies to contribute to MariaDB database project. via Muktware