Because going public is the only way for most shareholders (including most employees) to sell shares.

Don’t ask me why startups are designed this way.

It’s dumb.

I had no idea Mariadb was a startup. I thought it was an open source fork if mysql

MySQL is named after the founder’s daughter—My ( pronounced me by the way ). He sold it to Oracle and then, because it was Open Source, he forked it to create MariaDB. The name of his other daughter is Maria.

It's not pronounced Me, it's not English. But let's excuse your americanism.

No one I know had ever pronounced it Me. How did you come to the conclusion this non existent thing was an Americanism?

I think the reference is to the daughter's name, not the product. Previous discussion regarding name:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12203571

Ah. I thought the OP was saying "Americans pronounce it 'me' and that is wrong".

They were saying "Americans pronounce it 'my' and that is wrong".

Got it.

It's neither. I'm saying you're too dumb to understand that your language doesn't cover every other language.

Wait what? The same guy who made MySQL sold it to Oracle, then forked THAT code, started a new company on the same codebase then now is going public?

Many open source projects have startups behind them putting in all the work, usually with the hope of monetizing it. Which is a really hard problem - the choices are support and services (the software is FOSS but you sell support and implementation/review services to enterprises - what Red Hat used to do), or open core (only the core software is FOSS, and there are proprietary Enterprise versions with more Enterprise features). Neither are obvious and many open source startups fail.

Does anyone have info on what price early investors got the shares?

Retail launches are always designed to let them cash out with big multiples no matter what the price does.

I remember buying something I thought was “early” for $5 a share and later we learned the real earlies got in for $0.25. I was able to sell somehow at a price of $12 in the mania after it launched, but of course it eventually bled out down to $0.25 and beyond because of the constant selling from the insiders. They were always in profit, what did they care?

They were listed because the shareholders wanted liquidity and they didn't want to pay more to do it the "legitimate way", which is an IPO or direct listing.

I agree - I didn't realise it was a listed company. Does it compete with Oracle or SQL Server in terms of features?

My recollection is that it was created when Oracle took over MySQL in order to continue to have a community-driven GPLv2 "mysql compatible" server; I was expecting them to be more different than they are, but for comparison one is a "clean" GPLv2" and the other has more words and a link to oracle.com: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/mysql-8.0.31/LICE... https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/mariadb-10.11.1/COPYI...

Absolutely not. It's main feature is being wire compatible with mysql.

It’s just a fork of mysql.

Yeah that was my recollection. I thought putting a company behind it might have changed that but apparently not.

but an incompatible fork. There are many major differences between MySQL and MariaDB. https://mariadb.com/database-topics/mariadb-vs-mysql/

It wasn't an incompatible fork at first. It's now diverged a bit.

Companies don't have to be bleeding edge to list, owners might want to raise capital or exit, then they just have to meet exchange requirements