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RethinkDB is shutting down
291–300 of 457 posts
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
Now that RethinkDB has no commercial ambitions, will you consider re-licensing to more commercial friendly license?
The GPL is of course completely commerce-friendly, as it permits anyone to resell the original or modifications to it. What you're asking for is a license friendly to proprietary software[1].
Why on earth would they want to enable someone to close his modifications to RethinkDB? How does that make the world a better place? How does that encourage the growth of RethinkDB (vice the proliferation of closed, proprietary forks of RethinkDB)?
[1] Which is to say, user-hostile software. Users should be free to use, modify & distribute software.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#293It seems that unfortunately RethinkDB the company was architected in such a way that the success of their product, in terms of performance and developer experience, led to a decrease in revenue. This shutdown therefore goes a long way to say how talented and ethically correct the team was, something extremely evident in how they put correctness and reliability in front of performance. In short, RethinkDB is a very so…
Please dont make excuses for their failure. "Developer experience" and "performance" are never reasons for failure. What does lead to failure is
- lack of mass adoption - they didnt solve a problem everyone had
- lack of nitch adoption - they didnt solve a problem a few people had badly
I can tell you 4 features that I view more important than change subscription
- can run in any ecosystem - pouchdb/couchdb and waterline are examples of single apis in different environments. Even being able to use the database 100% in memory as a redis alternative would be nice.
- supports transactions across shards natively - this is a difficult but important feature that mongodb is missing
- supports document id transaction and table transaction - if Im only updating two documents, I have no interest in making many financial transactions wait for a table to be finished being used when I only care about 2 documents in that table.
- "sync" feature on a table - pouchdb supports this for syncing a client with a server
Rethinksb failed because, despite its sweet name, it wasnt solving that important of problems.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
yeah. RethinkDB is AGPL, which means that some people cannot use it (e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sourc... ). While a very well grounded interpretation says that merely using the AGPL'd service via a public API doesn't force you to release the clients, some companies would prefer buying a commercial license rather than facing the legal risk.
> RethinkDB is AGPL, which means that some people cannot use it
That's completely false: anyone has the right to use it, for any purpose; that's what Freedom Zero is all about.
Some people do not want to both use it and also comply with its terms, but that is their choice; they can and may use it, but choose not to.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
If open source only works when you pay for it, it's just an abstraction layer around ordinary commercial software, with the same pressures. In fact, most of the people qualified to fix Linux video drivers are already employed full-time at a graphics card manufacturer (with its sales pressures) or a commercial redistributor (with its sales pressures). You could pay one of those companies for a support contract. But ot…
With ordinary proprietary software, there's only one team in the world you could possibly hire for maintenance, and if they're too busy or have a conflict of interest you're just screwed. Competition among maintainers should make them more efficient and scale better.
Except that's not quite true for ordinary proprietary software - there are a number of people who make a living supporting Windows or Active Directory or Exchange or whatever who don't work for Microsoft. There is a difference of degree, in that third parties who support open-source code (e.g. Oracle supporting RHEL) have access to the source, and third parties who support proprietary code usually don't (although it's possible to get a MS read-only source license!) and only have access to compiled binaries. But that's not a huge difference. There are people who are very good at tracing and disassembling compiled binaries, or simply at understanding how the system works even in the absence of code, and they have thriving businesses. Sysinternals, for instance, was a separate business acquired by Microsoft.
(Note that I am carefully using the phrase "open source," not "free software". Part of the free software ethos is that you can realistically modify your code as needed. I do happen to think that the current free software movement isn't very good at delivering on this promise.)
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to speculate, I'd say that they spent a long time in development before monetizing, longer than investors were willing to entertain. It's hard for a B2B company to raise a Series B without a thoroughly proven revenue engine. I don't know how this could have been fixed though. Databases are hard to develop and it's a tough market to crack. Enterprises aren't going to buy an incomplete product, especially not…
Just looking at some of the RethinkDB and ReQL stuff, I certainly wouldn't have used it. Two things hit me immediately: - bad performance - a dearth of types (literally only a single numeric type that is a 64-bit float, so that eliminates entire categories that rely on integer/fixed-precision exact arithmetic. Also, time series are seriously hurt by that decision. I've seen DBs have to move to 64-bit longs because of…
> literally only a single numeric type that is a 64-bit float
After dealing with JavaScript and Lua, I am ready to call this a complete anti-pattern. To be a good language, it must support at least one size each of machine floats and ints. To be really good, it should be possible for me to choose any size of machine-supported floats and ints. To be great, it should also support rationals, fixed-point and complex numbers out of the box.
Giving me floats but not ints just doesn't cut it. It works, in a kind of shoddy way, but … it's tasteless.
If you don't provide me with bitwise operations (earlier versions of Lua, I'm looking at you), then you don't get to call yourself a real language.
For a database, though, I suppose one could always store integers as their string representation. But please, no language ever do this again ever.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#297This is sad. Looking forward to the post-mortems. A question in the interim: Did rethink ever consider building a SaaS business around the product? What were the reasons against it? Were there (a lot of) customers asking for a hosted version?
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
RethinkDB really managed to build quite a lot of positive feelings in me on the back of not very much technology. But what technology was there seemed very robust. Just kind of incomplete. My situation was very similar to latch's above. I vetted it earlier this year, after having developed warm fuzzy feelings for it last year at another company. We wound up going with Postgres + Solr because A) we've used them before…
Mongo may have been to ship non-acid compliant garbage, but MySQL just shipped with less features than Postgres.
Oh, come on, MyISAM didn't even support transactions.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#299I recognize there's hundreds of different factors that played a role in the story of RethinkDB and its relatively poor adoption. I'd like to touch on one specific point (probably far from the most important one) - the name.
I think you guys introduced friction very early on with some of the developers, because of your name. Given the context of our times where many of the devs joke around about "yet another 'revolutionary' database that claims to be different and then does the same thing, but dropping some crucial functionality" (for which I primarily blame MongoDB), "RethinkDB" can be considered a bit of a sardonic name. It can also read as "we need to reject the notions other databases are built on and rethink it all", which to more conservative devs can feel as an attack on decades of thought and design around their beloved MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Basically, I think this name might actively discourage developers from adopting your db or at least playing around with it.
Re: RethinkDB is shutting down
#300Holy shit, my worst nightmare is realized. I LOVE RethinkDB, I use it for EVERYTHING. It has everything I've ever wanted in a database. Relational documents, realtime feeds. Sadness. Someone better be picking up from where they left off.