Percona is built on the belief that Freedom matters, especially in how organizations run and evolve their database infrastructure. Our mission is to help customers and the broader community maximize that Freedom by giving them control, transparency, and choice at every layer.

Here is what that means in practice:

Open Source Software

At Percona, we believe Open Source is the foundation of Freedom. Its very roots are in the idea of “free software,” which ensures unrestricted use even without a commercial relationship, and enables permissionless innovation when you need to customize or extend it.

However, not all Open Source software is created equal. Permissive licenses (Apache, MIT, BSD) offer significantly more freedom than copyleft licenses (GPL, AGPL). And truly community-governed projects, where multiple companies actively contribute to development and maintenance, provide the strongest protection against license shifts, unilateral control, or abandonment.

Choice of Vendors

While Open Source gives you the ability to self-host and self-support, this is not a practical option for many businesses. Most organizations want partners they can rely on to deploy, support, and manage their systems.

But if a technology can only be supported by a single vendor, you effectively lose choice, and vendor lock-in becomes unavoidable. That’s a problem not only for Freedom but also for business continuity. A sole vendor can exit the market, let quality decline, or impose pricing that becomes unsustainable.

Having multiple viable vendors is what mitigates these risks and preserves true optionality.

Commodity Cloud

Cloud deployment is a smart choice for many workloads. But, if you value Freedom, you should treat the cloud as a commodity: rely on fundamental building blocks like compute and storage, and pair them with an Open Source software stack. Avoid locking your architecture into proprietary features or services available only from a single cloud provider.

By keeping your stack portable, you maintain real negotiation power and retain the ability to choose among multiple cloud vendors or even run on your own hardware if circumstances or strategy demand it.

Focused Proprietary Tools

While we believe Open Source is better, there are still many domains where no fully featured, mature Open Source alternative exists. In those cases, if you value your Freedom, it is better to keep proprietary software usage narrow and specific rather than adopting broad proprietary platforms that permeate large parts of your business.

Whenever you introduce proprietary software, ask a simple question: What is my plan if I need to replace this? Many vendors operate on a “hostage” model, where once adoption is deep enough, migration becomes nearly impossible, giving them leverage to impose excessive pricing or unfavorable terms.

By relying on multiple proprietary tools that serve focused purposes, you maintain the ability to swap them out if needed. The blast radius of any unreasonable policy is smaller, and your overall dependency footprint becomes far easier to manage.

We recognize that Freedom is not equally important to every organization. Many companies prefer the simplicity of relying on proprietary software, trusting a single vendor, and assuming everything will continue to work smoothly. And in many cases, it does … until it doesn’t.

As with other areas of life, the absence of Freedom isn’t felt every day. But when it does matter, the consequences can be significant: sudden price increases, unexpected license changes, forced migrations, or the loss of a critical vendor.

That’s why, even if infrastructure Freedom is not an immediate priority for a startup, it is still worth asking early: How important should Freedom be for us in the long run? Planning for it before you need it is far easier than trying to reclaim it later.