Are RethinkDB and Horizon abandoned?

Couchbase was a merger between NorthScale and CouchOne. The CouchOne founding team were all CouchdDB project founders: Damien Katz, J Chris Anderson, and Jan Lehnardt. NorthScale was founded by Steve Yen, who was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel, and Dustin Sallings, who was a committer on the Memcached project.

The first product that NorthScale released was called Membase, and the point of it was to help companies run large memcached clusters without having to think very hard. Couchbase later evolved into a hybrid of Membase and CouchDB that can speak the memcached protocol but also has some of the JSON document database properties that CouchDB has.

1 - Unabashedly, our #1 commitment is to our customers who are relying on Couchbase for their mission critical applications. That's why the Couchbase Enterprise Edition gets the bulk of our attention and testing.

2 - History can show that's it's actually more like 3-6 months of delay rather that 8-10 and corresponds more to our release cycles than to an artificially imposed delay.

3 - Couchbase CE is provided as a service to the community. Users who want to rely upon their own expertise to run a database in production have a responsibility to themselves and their organization to have the appropriate level of skills to do so. That should mean being able to debug and fix bugs themselves. In fact, our open source code base does not lag AT ALL and anyone is welcome to build off of that themselves and get all of the latest and greatest features (and bugs of course). If they're not willing to do this, they should be paying us to.

I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database with-scaling-issues} cluster.

But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has:

* Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training)

* Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support)

Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection.

I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep RethinkDB alive?

Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not working for them?