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RethinkDB is shutting down

rethinkdb.com

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#441

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

saurik wrote: post #392
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if I'm working at a company that has a blanket policy against using any (A)GPL software, then I can't use it. What the lawyers decide in a company that has 10k+ employees has nothing to do with the fears of anyone but the lawyers and the top management. Everyone else is just following the rules.

This definition of "can't" means there is no such thing as "won't".

Ummm...no. Won't implies you have a choice. Can't implies that it's not an option.

Working for one of those large companies, you simply don't have an option.

And the people without choices vastly outnumber the people who do have choices.

Frankly, most developers are probably happy using whatever code, under whatever license, that's available. It's the people who run the business who typically make the decisions about what's OK and what's not.

So it's developers who are punished by GPL, by and large, because many can't use the code. It's not helping those developers, and nothing zealots say or do will convince the legal department at those companies that they should change their position on (A)GPL.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#442

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

belorn wrote: post #430
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if I'm working at a company that has a blanket policy against using any (A)GPL software, then I can't use it. What the lawyers decide in a company that has 10k+ employees has nothing to do with the fears of anyone but the lawyers and the top management. Everyone else is just following the rules.

Sounds as good news for any competitor (if your company has any). The competitor can use (A)GPL when its suitable and get products out earlier with lowest costs. If development time is cheaper than doing per-case evaluation of a license, then something must be horrible wrong.

>Sounds as good news for any competitor (if your company has any).

Actually thinking of Amazon.com. They have competitors, sure. But they also have the budget to write their own entire stacks internally when the license doesn't fit. And it's not like their decision to avoid GPL software is hurting them in the market in any relevant way.

When something is MIT licensed, they'll use it, and they can and do contribute changes upstream. GPLv2 code requires serious hoop jumping to use, and GPLv3 software is verboten (the patent clause can't be adhered to by large companies with cross-licensing agreements: Many of these licensed patents can't be sublicensed, and so they can't be in compliance with the license at all).

So all GPL does is prevent companies from using and supporting the software. For every instance of an MIT project that ends up modified in proprietary code there are probably 100 that either use it verbatim or contribute changes back upstream. It just makes sense so that you don't need to keep maintaining an increasingly divergent fork.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#443

Post by jnordwick »

pdeva1 wrote: post #431
jnordwick wrote: post #73

Why does nobody seem to have any introspection on why RethinkDB failed? Clearly there are some major problems that people re ignoring. If my favorite DB (I must mention Kx Systems once a month) folded, I could give you a laundry list of issues where things went sideways, but all I see is glowing praise and comments about the best tech not always winning (KDB knocks the socks off of everything, but I sure can give you…

i wrote my thoughts here: http://movingfulcrum.com/rethinkdb-failure-engineering-not-m...

I don't agree with some of what you said, but at least you are taking a chance to try and figure out what when wrong. You have been bookmarked :)

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#444

Post by jinqueeny »

erichocean wrote: post #108
hueving wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can chalk this up to a failure of capitalism. Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. People like to hate on mysql/mariadb, but it also has a massive open source community. As a company choosing open source technologies, the popularity is important . Otherwise you run into issues finding answers to common problems and you end up paying through the nose for suppor…

> Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. Presumably, that's in part why CockroachDB decided to be more-or-less Postgres-compatible on the wire, and embraced SQL.

You can give TiDB a try. TiDB is a NewSQL database inspired by Google Spanner and F1. It supports the best features of both traditional RDBMS and NoSQL. Check it out here: https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#445

Post by zilchers »

formula1 wrote: post #293
simon_acca wrote: post #260

It 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 water…

I agree with the comment about distributed transactions - basically, Mongo had the first mover advantage and Rethink (albeit a great platform and easy to setup / administer) needed a big differentiator. That's actually why I'm using cockroach right now, they picked a great problem to solve (cross dc / cross continent transactions) that enables a ton of developer use cases.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#446

Post by erichocean »

jinqueeny wrote: post #444
erichocean wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Postgres is a tough database to contend with and it's mature and open source. Presumably, that's in part why CockroachDB decided to be more-or-less Postgres-compatible on the wire, and embraced SQL.

You can give TiDB a try. TiDB is a NewSQL database inspired by Google Spanner and F1. It supports the best features of both traditional RDBMS and NoSQL. Check it out here: https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

Interesting! First I've heard of it.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#447

Post by v3ss0n »

guessmyname wrote: post #43
joneholland wrote: post #3

A shame that a company like mongo can exist while a company like rethink folds.

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…

This is my stack.

TERP Stack : The most adventureous stack for

InTREPid EnTERPreneurs

Tornado RethinkDB Emberjs Python.

LEST GO!

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#448

Post by v3ss0n »

Since our startup is build entirely on Tornado + RethinkDB + Emberjs + Python , this is a huge blow.

But i do not worry , since this is announced many folks willing to support from community and many willing to contribute to RethinkDB in terms of both profit sharing and code steps up.

Also Stripe and Compose.io step up , to stand with RethinkDB .

I for one , a Startup Enterprenuer and Founder of Software Agency from Myanmar , Promise to share at least 5% of our profit on projects developed using RethinkDB to keep it Running .

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#449

Post by erickherring »

jnordwick wrote: post #172
jkarneges wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to each his own, but I don't think the product was the problem. Lots of people love RethinkDB. The comments here are proof of that.

This is the exact kind of comment I was warning against. The "it surely can't be the technology!" comment when yes, Shirley, it really can be. Even the best database systems I know (orders of magnitude quantitatively better than RethinkDB) have areas of technical weakness. And not just some areas, but usual gaping valleys. Nothing does everything well, and if it tries to it usually does everything below average. Time…

Get 'em, Jason!

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#450

Post by pluma »

scient wrote: post #427
pluma wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RethinkDB didn't fail because any of those things. As far as we can tell without an actual post mortem, it failed because RethinkDB -- the company -- didn't make enough money. Going by the public information on their website, the only way the company was making money from its product was via support and training. The problem with making money only with training and support is that it falls flat when the product and d…

Oh no, more starts on Github than MariaDB? Must be popular then! /s In all seriousness the OP nailed the issue. The company is not successful because of the "issues" with the product. There is a very direct correlation there, stop trying to make it look like the failure of the company did not have anything to do with the product and that the product is perfect/popular/whatever.

I knew someone would make fun of GitHub stars eventually, which is why I was hesitant to mention them.

Yes, RethinkDB wasn't more popular than MongoDB or MariaDB. Of course not. But if you followed the JS ecosystem or Hacker News or podcasts or any of the usual suspects it would have seemed that RethinkDB was quite successful for its size.

People talked about RethinkDB. Whenever someone talked about realtime or streaming data, RethinkDB would come up. That RethinkDB felt so ubiquitous despite its low rank in Google trends or even on StackOverflow speaks to how well the team knew how to make themselves heard.

I'm not saying RethinkDB itself is without fail. The most overhyped feature is realtime change feeds and those don't even work for all types of queries (especially aggregates and joins just aren't supported for that). Based on the documentation it also doesn't really sound like change feeds can work at scale.

But RethinkDB certainly managed to catch people's attention. They just couldn't turn that attention into revenue. And considering you actually have to go out of your way to find out how to give them money when looking at their website, that's not surprising.

Even if RethinkDB had been the best thing since sliced bread, it seems like they would have still failed as a company because of this. To put it into online marketing terms: they certainly had the traffic, but they couldn't get any conversions.

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