The MariaDB community
MariaDB has been created by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL, Monty Program Ab (which is now the MariaDB Corporation), and a founding member of the MariaDB Foundation, with the aim of being a backward compatible drop-in replacement for MySQL.
The goal of the MariaDB Foundation is to ensure that there is not just one entity that drives the development of MariaDB, and that the official MariaDB development tools stay open to the MariaDB developer community.
The core team is not only composed of members of the MariaDB Foundation, but of outsiders as well. Most companies and people working on MariaDB have joined the Foundation. This is the case because participating or committing code is not a prerequisite for being a part of the Foundation.