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RethinkDB is shutting down

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Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#451

Post by wmil »

zeveb wrote: post #294
ithkuil wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a nonsense definition. In general language it's perfectly reasonable to say things like "vegans can't each chicken". Responding "FALSE! They can, but they choose not too!" doesn't add anything.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#452

Post by belorn »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #442
belorn wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

When you are large enough and entrenched enough, you can do suboptimal decision and still win the race in both market share and revenue. IE and Microsoft comes in mind, and it took major failures and long time before competitor started to gain ground.

And it would explain why say a gaming company can't have such rigid policies. Preventing that a game get delayed is worth both lawyer time and, in the case that a license directly conflict with the business model, send mail to the author and asking for an exception. For example, I recall that LGPLv3 which has the same patent clause you describe as "clause can't be adhered to by large companies" is used by blizzard in starcraft 2. Blizzard is not Google in size, but they are not exactly a street vendor. One might also ask if they have much need to protect patents about xml parsing, or fonts, or what ever specialized functions those numerous library do that blizzard use to build a game. The only thing they don't use is copyleft, as their core business model is designed around restricting copying in order to limit supply when selling copies.

Per case evaluation make sense when your product is time sensitive and when there is a lot of competition. A game from Blizzard is almost treated the same by the market as a game by a indie studio (keyword: almost), and a such can't rely on market share to protect them. A bad, delayed, and rushed game is still bad and won't sell regardless of who made it (To name an example, the last batman game). They must be agile, which mean religious thinking about software licenses must be thrown out and per-case evaluation be added to the process. If a library can be use within the business model, saves time and money, and is not your core ingredient in making your game stand out, its almost always a good idea to use it.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#453

Post by PopsiclePete »

zeveb wrote: post #311
pc86 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile," and hyperbole like this does much more harm than good to people like me who would like to see more open source and less proprietary software in the world simply as a matter of principle.

> Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile," Yes, it is: by definition it violates one of the Four Freedoms of users … which is hostile.

I can see why you're sometimes labeled as "fanatics" and "zealots". You speak in religious-like absolute terms and use circular logic to "prove" you're correct. The GPL's biggest enemy are its most ardent supporters. Truly.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#454

Post by vidarh »

st3v3r wrote: post #338
vidarh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many early stage startups can't afford even a single salary. By the time enough cash is on the table to consider those kind of purchasing decisions, the initial round of architecture decisions have typically been made, and been cemented into the initial version of the software. E.g. I've worked on more than one startup where the first angel investment wasn't on the table before 6-12 months into development, and where…

So then the startup needs to get by with what it's got and earn money until they can afford it. Just like everyone else does with literally everything else.

Yes, and that is exactly the point: This means databases like Postgres or MySQL gets entrenched over options like KDB that costs a lot of even get started with. By the time they could afford the license, the cost of switching has risen dramatically.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#455

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

belorn wrote: post #452
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ch…

When you are large enough and entrenched enough, you can do suboptimal decision and still win the race in both market share and revenue. IE and Microsoft comes in mind, and it took major failures and long time before competitor started to gain ground. And it would explain why say a gaming company can't have such rigid policies. Preventing that a game get delayed is worth both lawyer time and, in the case that a licen…

>Blizzard is not Google in size

It's the Google/Amazon/IBM/Apple size where you end up with endemic cross-licensing patent agreements. That's where they can't adhere to it: They have a license to a thousand patents that protects them from being sued, but they don't have the right to sublicense those same patents. (L)GPLv3 requires they sublicense any patents they have to anyone who's sued, IIRC, so since they can't, they lose the ability to distribute their software.

I'd be somewhat surprised if Blizzard were a party to such an agreement. They might be party to a "patent-troll-don't-sue-me" agreement, I guess? No idea. But if they are, depending on the terms of their agreement, someone could potentially sue them over it based on LGPLv3 terms.

I'm not planning to, so I haven't done the research, to be sure. The risk scenario that comes to mind is a stretch, but say I buy a Blizzard game with LGPLv3 code in it, which grants me the right to be protected against patent lawsuits relevant to that code, and then I ship my own game that uses the same LGPLv3 code -- and I'm sued by a patent troll over a patent that Blizzard has licensed through some agreement. Guess what? I can now demand that Blizzard protect my use of the same LGPLv3 code by sublicensing me that patent. Which they (probably) don't have the right to do. So they either pay for my license or they have to stop distributing their LGPLv3 code.

For Amazon, who distribute tons of code for people to use in AWS, and the fact that they're a much larger, more collectable company, the scenario is proportionally worse.

It's all beside the point, though: In no case is it the line-level developer making the call, it's someone in management. Not everyone can (or even wants to) work for Blizzard or equivalent.

In particular, not everyone wants to work at literally half the compensation or less just so they can have full software freedom, whatever that means. The Google/Amazon/Apple compensation can be that much better than start-ups for top developers. I didn't realize this myself until I got a job at one of them.

And I'd love to be able to use RethinkDB where ever I end up next, without having to worry about whether the company legal department has a problem with (A|L)GPLv3. It's a battle I wouldn't even bother taking on in most cases; too much work when I could use something else and get back to doing real work.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#456

Post by fweespeech »

rer wrote: post #433
fweespeech wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACID correct distributed transactions create very, very painful performance problem because you have to lock across multiple physical machines separated by network connection(s). Or y'know, you just don't do them correctly and accept a substantial rate of quietly corrupted data. There isn't really a good option unless you have absurd amounts of money compared to your transaction volume.

ACID correct distributed transactions are possible. Google's F1 paper shows how: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Very, very painful problems are very, very valuable.

They are possible but they are not possible to make per formant compared to the alternative.

Google falls under the "absurd amount of money" camp.

> Protocol Buffers have performance implications for query processing. First, we always have to fetch entire Protocol Buffer columns from Spanner, even when we are only interested in a small subset of fields.

There are a number of performance costs documented in the paper. Simply because you can solve it via money doesn't mean it works for all situations.

Re: RethinkDB is shutting down

#457

Post by maushu »

sseveran wrote: post #178
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.

Loving a product is somewhat orthogonal. To be successful an open source DB company needs some large customers paying to make that model work. I dislike cassandra immensely, but I still use it every day.

Why do you dislike Cassandra?
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