Community protest successful: Galera remains open source in MariaDB

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Following protests from the open-source community, MariaDB plc has reversed its planned removal of Galera clustering technology from the MariaDB community server. Open-source high availability will thus remain included in version 12.3; alternatives would only have been available in commercial offerings.

As Max Mether, Vice President, Server Product Management at the company, explained in a blog post, community feedback is “an important part of MariaDB, and recently, you made your voices heard regarding the inclusion of Galera Cluster in the 12.3 series.” After careful consideration, the decision was made to continue delivering the Galera Cluster libraries unchanged with the community server.

Galera dependencies removed from MariaDB server without warning

In early February 2026, it became known that MariaDB was apparently planning to remove the Galera technology, licensed under GPLv2, from future versions of the community server. Federico Razzoli, founder of the database service provider Vettabase – a silver sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation – had, citing relevant discussions on GitHub, publicly documented on LinkedIn that Galera dependencies had already been removed from the binaries without commit messages or task descriptions. Criticism spread rapidly within the community. According to MariaDB, the feedback from Frédéric (lefred) Descamps (Community Advocate of the MariaDB Foundation) and René Bonvanie (Board Member of the MariaDB Foundation) was particularly influential in the company rethinking its decision.

Galera enables synchronous multi-master replication for MariaDB databases. Several servers act as equal nodes in a cluster, with each node accepting write operations and automatically replicating them to other nodes. The technology is considered essential for highly available production environments. After MariaDB first integrated Galera technology from Codership in 2013, the responsible parties decided in May 2025 to acquire Codership Oy completely.

Foundation confirms dialogue

The MariaDB Foundation confirmed in its blog post that there had been an open dialogue between the foundation and the company. Kaj Arnö, executive chairman of the foundation, characterized the collaboration as marked by “mutual respect and a shared long-term interest in the MariaDB ecosystem.” However, it remains unclear what the future holds for Galera development as part of MariaDB and whether the community edition will continue to receive Galera updates.

As Max Mether also makes unmistakably clear in his blog post, the company is pursuing several avenues to provide users with high availability functions. In addition to Galera in the community server, these include the MariaDB Enterprise Cluster, which is based on Galera, and the MariaDB Advanced Cluster, available as a technical preview, which uses the Raft protocol to ensure improved scalability and data consistency across geographical regions. Both versions are exclusively available as commercial offerings from MariaDB.

Against this backdrop, while the MariaDB Foundation continues to advocate for the trustworthy use of Galera by the community, the official statement from CEO Anna Widenius in the Foundation's blog also clarifies that decisions regarding future development and allocation of technical resources lie solely with MariaDB plc. As the owner of Galera, the company controls its roadmap, naming, and the underlying development resources.

Question of trust remains

The affair once again reveals structural tensions between the commercial interests of MariaDB plc and the open-source ideals of the Foundation. Razzoli publicly called for MariaDB plc to guarantee on its website that the open-source software would remain open. The concern: the company might remove features from the free version to steer users towards proprietary offerings.

MariaDB has gone through turbulent times in recent years. Following a SPAC-backed IPO at the end of 2022, there were layoffs, going concern warnings, and a stock price collapse. In December 2023, the company spun off its DBaaS service SkySQL, was itself privatized in September 2024, and brought SkySQL back in mid-2025. After privatization, Kaj Arnö had stated that “common sense” had returned to the relationship between the community and the company. However, the Galera controversy shows that trust remains fragile and that the community is ready to speak out loudly to preserve open technologies.

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