Riak and the demise of Basho • Hacker News Board

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#91

Post by pron » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 8:26 PM UTC

mirashii wrote: post #74

pron wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your organization uses any of: Linux, Android, emacs, gcc or any GNU utility, OpenJDK, or MongoDB, then GPL is clearly not a no-go. GPL only poses issues when the product is a library. For standalone products or ones with linking/access exceptions like OpenJDK, GPL poses no issues, and organizations aren't afraid to use it, especially when they don't intend to modify it. GPL is a great license that ensures that im…

> If your organization uses any of: Linux, Android, emacs, gcc or any GNU utility, Two things wrong with this right off the bat. First, not all of these are GPLv3, which is the version with the problematic patent clauses that scare companies away. Second, it is not just in libraries that the GPLv3 is generally accepted to pose potential issues. You need look no further than Apple and the great investment they went th…

> First, not all of these are GPLv3, which is the version with the problematic patent clauses that scare companies away.

So, if Linux were GPLv3 you're saying that most companies wouldn't use it?

> You need look no further than Apple and the great investment they went through to avoid ever shipping GPLv3 software.

Most companies aren't like Apple.

> The GPL kicks in as soon as you distribute the software.

That's right, and that's a good thing. If you distribute GPL software that you modify, you need to make your modifications public. But as Riak is not a library, it does not infect any other component. If you distribute software with (say, Android) Linux but don't modify Linux then the GPL doesn't infect the other components of your software, as they're not actually linked (or Linux has some explicit exceptions).

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#92

Post by macintux » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 11:14 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #57

ulkesh wrote: post #32

This really doesn't surprise me. My experience with Riak (admittedly in 2012-2014) was that it did not live up to the hype. As strictly a key-value store, it wasn't bad, but toss in 2i, etc, and it quickly became problematic. Open sourcing the software will surely be a good thing, though. I'm eager to see where it leads.

I worked with riak pretty extensively in that time period. I'm in more or less the same boat. It had cool features, but they didn't make up for the overall kind of slow performance and limited feature-set. (Admittedly, our use of riak was clearly a case of premature optimization: we didn't have anything like the scale to require an available data-store.)

As a technical evangelist for Basho, I would encourage sales prospects to think carefully about what they really needed. One of the problems trying to sell Riak is that, unless you know you need the availability it can offer at the scale it can support, you're probably better off choosing something with more features and less scale.

And, although clearly we're swimming in more data than ever, not all that many people have both massive data sets and a burning need to never lose any of it. A lot of data can be lossy without any real consequence.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#93

Post by gabetax » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 11:31 PM UTC

menacingly wrote: post #68

lmm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cassandra was based on the same thing, no? In my experience Cassandra has been what's beaten Riak.

If I remember correctly, Cassandra is actually an ideological frankenstein from pieces of BigTable & Dynamo EDIT: I don't mean to disparage it, just that it doesn't come as purely from one direction as Riak. It certainly appears to have won

I prefer to think of it as the mullet of the database world: Bigtable in the front, Dynamo in the back.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#94

Post by romwell » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 3:08 AM UTC

andrew_deane_ wrote: post #17

Today bet365 have signed the agreement to purchase all Basho IP. We expect the agreement to be ratified in the US courts next week. Once cleared, our intention is to open source all code, help rebuild the community and collaboratively take the development of RIAK forward. In the coming weeks we will hopefully answer the questions people have and will be calling on the community to help forge the initial RIAK Roadmap.…

Great! There aren't that many persistent (disk-based) KV-stores out there. I planned to, but didn't get to actually use Riak, and was sad when the company seemed to go down.

As far as licensing goes, it would be great to have one that would allow me to link the client code libraries and run the servers without having to worry about anything. If I understand correctly, Apache2 goes way beyond that, while GPL is somewhat ambiguous on that. (Yes, one could implement their own client, but that'd be reinventing the wheel).

Thank you for keeping this work alive!

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#95

Post by romwell » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 3:12 AM UTC

pron wrote: post #65

atonse wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't do GPL – It's a no-go and too restrictive for a lot of organizations. Apache 2 or MIT would be the most permissive.

If your organization uses any of: Linux, Android, emacs, gcc or any GNU utility, OpenJDK, or MongoDB, then GPL is clearly not a no-go. GPL only poses issues when the product is a library. For standalone products or ones with linking/access exceptions like OpenJDK, GPL poses no issues, and organizations aren't afraid to use it, especially when they don't intend to modify it. GPL is a great license that ensures that im…

> GPL only poses issues when the product is a library

What about the client libraries? Do you consider them to be a part of the product? It might make sense to release the client code (library) and the server code under different licenses (Apache2/GPL, respectively) if GPL is to be used.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#96

Post by jjirsa » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 4:24 AM UTC

gabetax wrote: post #93

menacingly wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, Cassandra is actually an ideological frankenstein from pieces of BigTable & Dynamo EDIT: I don't mean to disparage it, just that it doesn't come as purely from one direction as Riak. It certainly appears to have won

I prefer to think of it as the mullet of the database world: Bigtable in the front, Dynamo in the back.

Vice versa, if network is front and disk is back (as it is in the code).

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#97

Post by rurban » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 6:30 AM UTC

andrew_deane_ wrote: post #17

Today bet365 have signed the agreement to purchase all Basho IP. We expect the agreement to be ratified in the US courts next week. Once cleared, our intention is to open source all code, help rebuild the community and collaboratively take the development of RIAK forward. In the coming weeks we will hopefully answer the questions people have and will be calling on the community to help forge the initial RIAK Roadmap.…

Riak and riak core are already Apache 2. Sounds fine.

https://github.com/basho/riak/blob/develop/LICENSE

https://github.com/basho/riak_core/blob/develop/LICENSE

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#98

Post by EGreg » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 7:04 AM UTC

I thought Riak was the most impressive and useful open source database until CockroachDB. Would like to see it continue!

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#99

Post by pron » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 11:16 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #95

pron wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your organization uses any of: Linux, Android, emacs, gcc or any GNU utility, OpenJDK, or MongoDB, then GPL is clearly not a no-go. GPL only poses issues when the product is a library. For standalone products or ones with linking/access exceptions like OpenJDK, GPL poses no issues, and organizations aren't afraid to use it, especially when they don't intend to modify it. GPL is a great license that ensures that im…

> GPL only poses issues when the product is a library What about the client libraries? Do you consider them to be a part of the product? It might make sense to release the client code (library) and the server code under different licenses (Apache2/GPL, respectively) if GPL is to be used.

> It might make sense to release the client code (library) and the server code under different licenses (Apache2/GPL, respectively) if GPL is to be used.

Yep.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#100

Post by gordonguthrie » Thu, Sep 07, 2017, 11:46 AM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #73

andrew_deane_ wrote: post #17

Today bet365 have signed the agreement to purchase all Basho IP. We expect the agreement to be ratified in the US courts next week. Once cleared, our intention is to open source all code, help rebuild the community and collaboratively take the development of RIAK forward. In the coming weeks we will hopefully answer the questions people have and will be calling on the community to help forge the initial RIAK Roadmap.…

Fantastic news! I just used Riak Core for making a multi-master service. It was impressively straightforward! Glad to hear there are people intents to continue the project as OSS. Will this include the Basho technical documents? Much of the better technical documentation lives on basho.com and was returning 404's. [edit: and a +1 for Apache V2 (or MPL)]

https://www.tiot.jp/riak-docs/