As a former employee at Rethink, I'm super sad to hear about this, but know that they are all great people capable of even more than what they have accomplished with this amazing database! Will continue to recommend RethinkDB ferociously to everyone I know and will always fondly look back at my time there!
RethinkDB is shutting down
181–190 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#182This is sad - Was planning on moving from Postgres to Rethink as our plan once we start to hit scalability limits / needing to shard. I guess we will see how the open source efforts go.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#183I find it hard to trust HN users as I was about to adopt and migrate from MongoDB to rethinkDB based on consensus by HN user comments about it being undeniably superior, yet it was actually close to shutting down apparently.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries…
We tried with the REEP stack. RethinkDB, Elixir, Elm, Phoenix.
How did that work out?
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#185I'm glad they are joining Stripe, both of them great and cool companies.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mongo also got there "first". I mean, Mongo isn't much compared to Rethink, but they're both in the "not a traditional SQL database" camp and Mongo came before and had all the hype first. I wouldn't be surprised if people a) didn't use Rethink because they're happy with Mongo and its popularity b) hated Mongo and saw Rethink as too similar/didn't research it enough.
Well, Couch DB got there first but it didn't help them much. I think you're right it was mostly about social media marketing.
Early couch had scaling problems. We built a product around it and had a terrible time keeping it running at scale. Ruined erlang for me, too. Not from the language, but the problems with the build tools.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#187I'm not familiar with RethinkDB - what was their monetization strategy?
Sell support contracts. Kind of similar to MongoDB's strategy, but they were too late to the party. Also the "support" open source business model doesn't always scale well and works better when the product quality and documentation isn't so first rate (like Rethinkdb's is).
Actually I think they were too early in the market. Everything is moving towards real-time updates but we're at the beginning of that curve yet.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IP is open source, and Stripe owes nothing to RethinkDB's investors. Why buy something you can have for free?
There might still be copyrights, trademarks, domains (and even patents).
The copyrights and patents are already covered under the licenses they used (AGPL v3 and Apache v2). A search for RETHINKDB on the USPTO trademark search engine turns up no results.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patrick, I am curious why Stripe didn't just acquire RethinkDB completely? Seems like you could have gotten a bargain. Their investors get some money back, you'd get their excellent intellectual property, and finally the entire functioning RethinkDB team joins Stripe. Win-win right?
The IP is open source, and Stripe owes nothing to RethinkDB's investors. Why buy something you can have for free?
Just a hypothetical - if you actually own the IP, you may be able to release future versions under non-free licenses. However I don't see Stripe in the premium-DB business.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sales. Marketing. In today's world having someone push a new database for a hefty price is not going to work. I would need to be able to test it against mongo and decide myself that it is better... but how would I know it's even an option?
Is there a firm line between sales and marketing these days? Is sales just the high-touch end of the marketing continuum?
Marketing is about figuring out your customer's needs.
Sales is about promoting your products.
Both are done to sell more stuff.