The news in the article is that CNCF spent good money to wipe out a copyleft license. They think history has shown a more permissive license without copyleft or a patent grab (just a patent notice ) - namely ASLv2 - is a far superior choice and paid to get that in place. Their very recent explanation is well worth reading: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2017/02/01/cncf-recommends-aslv2 I'll explain what I mean by patent no…
RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
101–110 of 112 posts
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#102I had a question about this passage:
"The company behind RethinkDB shut down last year after struggling to build a sustainable business around the product. Many former RethinkDB employees currently work for Stripe, where they help build infrastructure for developers around the world."
Is Stripe a big RethinkDB shop or is there another connection between the two?
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#103This is great news! Rethink is NoSql DB done properly, I know many others such as Cassandra often get mentioned as alternatives to Mongo but they aren't really. I just hope the rigor and correctness that have characterized RethinkDB continue moving forward as a community project. Part of me feels sad it never caught on and will never be a commercial success like Mongo, but that's in the past. Horizon is another excit…
RethinkDB is in my mind firstly Mongo done right... Cassandra is a very different beast, but seems to be the better option when you need massive (100+ node clusters) scaling, but that comes with a lot of work in terms of development. While RethinkDB is probably most comparable to Mongo, it's worth noting that the sharding/replication/fail-over support and model is much better than Mongo's. Beyond that, the update not…
>"Also, rethink supports joins at the server (though best to avoid a lot of the time)."
Does RethinkDB have distributed joins then? These sort of notoriously difficult to implement well no? I see you say its best to avoid. I would curious to hear you experience with them.
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this. Then again, maybe the board would have balked at that as a sign of no confidence.
You generally have to move carefully to get proprietary software to an open source model. One typical customer reaction to rumors you are open sourcing is "Great! We'll wait until you do that to try it out." The result is that [already not good] sales may tank completely.
RethinkDB wasn't proprietary. It was open source, licensed under the AGPL v2, the same license used by MongoDB, which is doing just fine. MongoDB is one of the top five in the DB-Engines rankings.
One of the key business differences between RethinkDB and MongoDB is that the latter keeps some enterprise-grade features/tools closed-source and available under a commercial license, i.e. the "open core" business model.
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#105Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#106I had a question about this passage: "The company behind RethinkDB shut down last year after struggling to build a sustainable business around the product. Many former RethinkDB employees currently work for Stripe, where they help build infrastructure for developers around the world." Is Stripe a big RethinkDB shop or is there another connection between the two?
Stripe hired most of the Rethink engineering team after the shutdown. They're no longer working on Rethink professionally, but many are still contributing in their own time.
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#107I stayed away from Rethink in the past few years due to its uncertain future. Now I'm seriously interested. Looking forward to the next chapter of RethinkDB.
I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this. Then again, maybe the board would have balked at that as a sign of no confidence.
>I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this.
I think continuation of development and community growth even after they closed down is what gives people confidence - and there's no practical way to show that upfront (assuming that having a big/visible community outside of your core company is not viable for such project in that ammount of time) - re-licencing just the first step to that. They proved what happens in a "worse case scenario" but I don't think you could have done it without going trough it.
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#108I wish some company (apart from compose.io) would create a RethinkDB as a service (DBaaS). I would totally love a dynamodb or firebase kind of payment structure! I specifically excluded compose not because their service is not great (from what I've heard - it's excellent) but more so because they charge a premium for it.
I'm wondering what kind of legal shenanigans I would have to wrangle with in order to do this.
Exactly what is and is not allowed when making a service based on an Open Source tool?
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#109The team behind RethinkDB has been a class act. Thank you for creating a fantastic product and doing what's right by your users even as you were winding down.
It's really true. I was looking at RethinkDB for a project a while back, but decided to go another way, but I've been following it from a distance ever since. At all steps of this process, it's been clear that the core developers have been doing their utmost to do right by their users, even in the face of unfortunate business developments. It's really heartening to see this news.
Re: RethinkDB joins the Linux Foundation: What Happens Next
#110My weird and unrelated question is: if I donate software to an open source group like the Linux Foundation, can I write it off my taxes? And if so, how do I assess the value of it? RethinkDB probably has some legitimate market value...can the founders reflect that on their taxes?
Had never thought of this... for Linux Foundation, I don't believe so. However, it'd be interesting to see an Open Source Foundation set up as a 501(c)3, where contributors would get to write off a certain value given for their contribution. The hard part would be, what is the value of the product you have contributed, and how will it stand up under audit?
Or would it just be considered a service and, just like volunteering, you can't really write it off.
I can see a foundation that provides software to the community, especially communities that would other wise not have access to it, and or municipalities, etc.