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RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

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Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#61

Post by DigitalJack »

davidbanham wrote: post #53
pan69 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going out on a limb here, and I know neither MongoDB or RethinkDB (nor the companies behind them) very well. But, from what you're saying it almost sounds like that RethinkDB would be a great companion to MongoDB. And if so, that the company behind MongoDB might be a great custodian for RethinkDB.

That thought fills me with dread. Rethink is well engineered and has a great developer experience. Mongo isn't and doesn't.

All these comments are starting to make me feel stupid. I picked mongo for a side project, and it's been really nice so far. I have a hard time imagining how one would use it for a complicated and/or large schema though. I assume that is just my newness to it.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#62

Post by rburhum »

mgreg wrote: post #15

Several interesting ideas to ponder due to the RethinkDB shutdown. 1. Business model / strategy is as important as the technology. Way too many people believe that all they need to do is build a great product (by all accounts it seems RethinkDB did) and the rest will take care of itself. Enterprise software is a very difficult business and at the moment going through tremendous change and while there is good opportun…

> 1. Business model / strategy is as important as the > technology. Way too many people believe that all they need > to do is build a great product (by all accounts it seems > RethinkDB did) and the rest will take care of itself. > Enterprise software is a very difficult business and at the > moment going through tremendous change and while there is > good opportunity it takes much more than good tech.

Amen to this!

When I was CTO of my previous company, I always thought of the "product" as the technology we were building.

As CEO of my current one, the "product" is really the business model we are nurturing/shaping. Even when we are creating amazing technology, the business model is the thing that requires the most care and the main driver of whether we succeed or fail - the real product.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#63

Post by pan69 »

davidbanham wrote: post #53
pan69 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just going out on a limb here, and I know neither MongoDB or RethinkDB (nor the companies behind them) very well. But, from what you're saying it almost sounds like that RethinkDB would be a great companion to MongoDB. And if so, that the company behind MongoDB might be a great custodian for RethinkDB.

That thought fills me with dread. Rethink is well engineered and has a great developer experience. Mongo isn't and doesn't.

I'm not entirely to sure if I understand your comment, however, what I mean is;

The company behind MongoDB is a database company so they probably have some sort of affinity and appreciation for a product like RethinkDB, and, they are commercially successful (or at least, it appears to be that way).

Just because, hypothetically, MongoDB could be a custodian for RethinkDB don't mean that all of a sudden RethinkDB becomes MongoDB.

As Paul pointed out, both solutions seem to be two different products covering two different use cases and audiences and from what I can imagine, they might actually complement each other.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#64

Post by jleader »

api wrote: post #45

I'm watching this very closely since I am a founder of another OSS-based company doing something very hard and trying to monetize via things like services, support, etc. (Ironically we just ported the new version of our SaaS code base to RethinkDB! We plan to stick with it. It's too nice, and I'm optimistic it'll find an OSS home.) I'm anxiously awaiting the postmortem, but my sense (albeit from a distance not knowin…

I'm a long ways from being a VC, but I see one reason they might prefer the larger, higher-burn-rate company. I think one of the hard jobs for a VC-funded startup is growing really fast (to become big enough to be worth-while when the VCs cash out). The company with more head count may have a head-start on that growth (assuming they actually hired the right people). So if you're a VC looking to place a bet on a company becoming huge enough to offset all your other failed bets, a company that's being very cautious about growth might not be what you're looking for.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#65

Post by __jal »

DigitalJack wrote: post #61
davidbanham wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thought fills me with dread. Rethink is well engineered and has a great developer experience. Mongo isn't and doesn't.

All these comments are starting to make me feel stupid. I picked mongo for a side project, and it's been really nice so far. I have a hard time imagining how one would use it for a complicated and/or large schema though. I assume that is just my newness to it.

Nope, you have it right. Mongo is a lot of fun to play with out of the box. Once you have nontrivial data models, redundancy and load, not so much.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#66

Post by quicklyfrozen »

dmitrig01 wrote: post #60
bmodeldotcom wrote: post #44

The business model that the SageMath guy failed to consider was the "Money at the End of the Rainbow" model used by Spring, JBoss and MySQL. His comment about licensing was also interesting: "At a bare minimum, I think they must switch to a very liberal license (Apache instead of AGPL)"

Could you elaborate on what "Money at the End of the Rainbow" business model is? Thanks!

Acquisition

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#67

Post by Ros2 »

>They were also worried about how small the total market cap

>I do not think it is impossible to build an open source business (I think Wordpress is an example), and I do not need to raise VC.

Is the right market here not everything like A16Z told you? The market for wordpress is crazy large with several blog platforms seeing 100+ million dollar exits and it seems no one who gets in this space fails--clearly the market is large.

I also look at other open source projects that have "made it" and they just seem to be tackling bigger markets than you are. Is there a chance the market of what you're doing just seems big to you because of personal interest in the product? (Not trying to be inflammatory with that comment)

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#68

Post by williamstein »

Ros2 wrote: post #67

>They were also worried about how small the total market cap >I do not think it is impossible to build an open source business (I think Wordpress is an example), and I do not need to raise VC. Is the right market here not everything like A16Z told you? The market for wordpress is crazy large with several blog platforms seeing 100+ million dollar exits and it seems no one who gets in this space fails--clearly the mark…

I don't see the market I am targeting as huge, and I agree with you that it is probably easier for Wordpress to succeed than SageMathCloud. I'm perhaps too realistic about the potential market for SageMathCloud, which was a reason why A16Z wasn't interested. If I took VC funding I might not have the option to focus on a smaller market.

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#69

Post by dsl »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #40
ericd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen that in any db I've worked with. If that's true, that's pretty huge.

Firebase works like that. The polling of databases is a really obvious limitation of existing databases once you see the alternative. (I work at Firebase)

I searched and searched, but I couldn't find a download link on Firebase.com. Help?

Re: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

#70

Post by chipotle_coyote »

paulsutter wrote: post #4

To understand what happened to RethinkDB, you want to contrast it with MongoDB. RethinkDB is amazing software and a real breakthrough. And the audience of deep thinking people who can really leverage the event model is ... limited. Today. MongoDB is no breakthrough, but there are legions of people who just want to plug something together with PHP or Node. Given what they're doing, it works fine. I sincerely hope Reth…

I admit I don't have a lot of experience with MongoDB, but RethinkDB was really easy to plug into Node. While we didn't support PHP officially, the PHP RethinkDB driver was maintained by RethinkDB's engineering manager, Daniel Mewes, and it looked pretty solid.

When I started at RethinkDB, it was before changefeeds were a thing. I always thought the "killer feature" was, well, ReQL. It had the qualities of an ORM/DB Builder in your native language of choice. There was a poster on the wall that said "Databases should be indistinguishable from magic"; I always thought that was a perfect pitch to the RethinkDB audience. I understand why they canted toward pitching the realtime aspects first and foremost after changefeeds came about, but I thought it had great power even if you weren't focused on realtime/event-driven aspects, and perhaps that should have been emphasized more.

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