Posted by Baron Schwartz |

Percona has been building and contributing to open-source software since the company was founded, and individually we’ve been doing the same thing for many years.  We think it’s a huge value for our customers and the community.

We’re involved in a dozen or so open-source projects, but our three core efforts at the moment are the following:

  • Percona patches, which are included in our own MySQL builds and then in OurDelta builds and perhaps others as well
  • XtraDB, which is our new high-performance transactional storage engine
  • Maatkit, which is a toolkit that provides advanced functionality for MySQL.

We have a team of dedicated MySQL developers working on the server and on ExtraDB, and a dedicated Maatkit developer. Other Percona employees also put significant time into these projects.

Outside observers have commented that our development process doesn’t seem very open-source.  That is, we typically just go build the software and then announce it. We don’t involve the community very much in our decisions about what features to include, or how they should get built; and we don’t encourage community contributions directly into our codebase.  There’s also some ambiguity about where the money comes from and where it goes.  These are all fair points to bring up.  Peter, Vadim and I thought we should address them and let everyone know how we really work on these things and what our vision for the future is.

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