Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire.
I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project.
Btw, this is our Java ORM built on top of RethinkDB Java driver: https://github.com/DevScore/rethinkdb-java-orm
I chose RethinkDB for a core component of a project back in 2013 and really liked it. I think we were probably one of the earliest production adopters but sadly we couldn't talk about it much. I wanted a document store done right and RethinkDB was definitely it.
I hope the OSS project is able to gather steam.
Best of luck Slava.
And I'm only using it for hobby projects. I don't want to use MongoDB.
Thinking about it, I'll just keep using it for now.
Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
Don't you see this is self fulfilling?
Don't pay for databases, database companies close.
Or, you can take this as a cautionary tale, and consider paying reasonable, good companies for the technology they create. Not out of pity or charity, simply because you're getting value from the software created.
Please put RethinkDB under the GPL or an even more liberal license?
Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far.
HN mods: what happened here?
Edit: Here's a semi-buried sctb response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225
Are there any circumstances where a company can reasonably go dark for a week?
If it is an acquisition it's pretty disrepectful of people investing in their solution.
Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
Didn't the same problem happen to the CloudFlare with LuaJIT where they would like to hire guys that worked on it but couldn't ?
Things can get difficult in some situations, we're all human. But Joyent going bankrupt wouldn't mean the end of Node. But where is Datomic without Cognitent?
I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database with-scaling-issues} cluster.
But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has:
* Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training)
* Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support)
Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection.
I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep RethinkDB alive?
Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not working for them?
The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open source is a low-margin, high volume industry.
These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need to become profitable.
On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are just spamming the internet with their ads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682
TL;DR a lot of people think there's a secrete acquisition going on and they are doing code evaluation
Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the community.
It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this pretty closely.
(I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking generally here)
Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do.
The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail.
Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size.
Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.
1. Valuable product maintained by professionals 2. Is free 3. Will be around for a long time
Yes, I know there are exceptions.
Open Source doesn't work in the long term without sponsorship of some sort.
Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable; the source code or everything else?
Link: http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile
1 - Unabashedly, our #1 commitment is to our customers who are relying on Couchbase for their mission critical applications. That's why the Couchbase Enterprise Edition gets the bulk of our attention and testing.
2 - History can show that's it's actually more like 3-6 months of delay rather that 8-10 and corresponds more to our release cycles than to an artificially imposed delay.
3 - Couchbase major releases has always had CE and EE in sync.
4 - Couchbase CE is provided as a service to the community. Users who want to rely upon their own expertise to run a database in production have a responsibility to themselves and their organization to have the appropriate level of skills to do so. That should mean being able to debug and fix bugs themselves. In fact, our open source code base does not lag AT ALL and anyone is welcome to build off of that themselves and get all of the latest and greatest features (and bugs of course). If they're not willing to do this, they should be paying us to.
As far as I know, Memcached's longtime maintainer / primary contributor (dormando) is not involved with Couchbase, and neither is Memcached's original creator (bradfitz).
Couchbase was a merger between NorthScale and CouchOne. The CouchOne founding team were all CouchdDB project founders: Damien Katz, J Chris Anderson, and Jan Lehnardt. NorthScale was founded by Steve Yen, who was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel, and Dustin Sallings, who was a committer on the Memcached project.
The first product that NorthScale released was called Membase, and the point of it was to help companies run large memcached clusters without having to think very hard. Couchbase later evolved into a hybrid of Membase and CouchDB that can speak the memcached protocol but also has some of the JSON document database properties that CouchDB has.
I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.
https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-ab...
That doesn't sound promising :/
How many frameworks/languages/tools would survive if their parent company disappeared?
I know IO.js was successful when diverging from nodejs (even if they ended up merging again).
It's not that we are super set on using RethinkDB, but love ReQL! Going back to SQL just seems a huge step back at this point.
Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sach...
