It’s an open source venture backed by $35M from FirstMark Capital, Spark Capital, and GV (Google Ventures). It’s a drop-in replacement for MySQL with an extension architecture. See their native UUID extension with efficient 16-byte storage as an example.
Agree. Although Mariadb has drifted significantly (and with very good reason) in terms code, features and SQL - I still mentally parse “Mysql” as “MariaDb”. It’s one of the best forks I’ve ever encountered in all my time using foss. I currently maintain around 80 MariaDb servers and have remarkably few problems.
Much as I like to see variety in software, I do kind of wish more recognition of MariaDb was given, and more support.