Slava @ RethinkDB here. I am not able to get into details yet, but the short version is that the commercial entity behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We're working on continuity for the open-source project. Full announcement (and details) coming in a day or two.
Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire.
I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project.
Wow, that's a surprise. We like Rethink very much and are also deeply invested in it. We'd be willing to lend a hand with OSS development, especially Java driver (which needs much love).
Dammit -- so sorry to hear that. :( As you know, I am a huge fan of RethinkDB, and I certainly know the challenges of building an open source based business. You guys succeeded wildly at building excellent software that will endure -- and I for one will be sporting one of my beloved RethinkDB shirts tomorrow...
Slava: As the commercial strategy is over, please release everything under a very liberal open source license rather than AGPL (the current RethinkDB license). Please. I have invested so much in building on RethinkDB, and you can't just will a genuine open source community into existence without giving them the power that comes with a liberal license. Honestly, right now I'm evaluating how I can rewrite everything I've built to not use RethinkDB, which will take me months of fulltime work...
I chose RethinkDB for a core component of a project back in 2013 and really liked it. I think we were probably one of the earliest production adopters but sadly we couldn't talk about it much.
I wanted a document store done right and RethinkDB was definitely it.
I just love what you created, and really hope that it just keeps getting better. I was discussing with my team to switch to RethinkDB on some services just this Monday.
Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
I hate to wish bad fortune on anyone, but I hope that you're shutting down rather than an acqui-hire. I'm sure that there's enough interest in RethinkDB that most of your individual devs can make a good living developing and doing support for RethinkDB either as contractors or employees elsewhere. I believe that RethinkDB has enough traction that switching to a foundation model will be good for the product.
This is heartbreaking to hear... really wish you guys the best, and hoping you can spin things off into a foundation that can at least keep the lights on and the core devs employed.
To everyone who has used RethinkDB for free and now wants the product of the company to be released to open source for free use:
Don't you see this is self fulfilling?
Don't pay for databases, database companies close.
Or, you can take this as a cautionary tale, and consider paying reasonable, good companies for the technology they create. Not out of pity or charity, simply because you're getting value from the software created.
This thread seems actively being burried by HN. Now it's flagged as dupe and the previous thread from yesterday also quickly disappeared from the front page after gaining traction.
Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far.
The previous discussion was buried too. I'd also like to know why a link with +250 points is modded away. Obviously they are trying to keep it on the dl, but we really need some transparency when HN the news site conflicts with YC the fund.
On the contrary, I would say that enterprises should take the risk and use such projects. They likely have enough capital to hire the correct people (e.g. one of the core devs) when a problem shows up.
Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
Well the great thing is that since it's open source (esp. if the OSS community itself is vibrant), the software can outlive the company.
Things can get difficult in some situations, we're all human. But Joyent going bankrupt wouldn't mean the end of Node. But where is Datomic without Cognitent?
It looks like RethinkDB is relying solely on revenue from training and support. Is that even feasible for a product like theirs?
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?
They were trying to pivot to at least two additional revenue models during he last year, but it seems to have simply took too long (1. Custom closed code for enterprise customers, 2. Hosted Horizon). I have paid RethinkDB for support by the way, just to support them.
RethinkDB is not perfect there is tons of issues. For example it useing too much memory for the large volumes of data and then performance tends to degrade.
I think now is not a good time for open source. There is just too much advertising in the tech industry.
The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open source is a low-margin, high volume industry.
These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need to become profitable.
On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are just spamming the internet with their ads.
RethinkDB kicked (at least) 2 people from their Github organization involved in Horizon development. This tells me they plan to continue the organization in some way--probably under another company and not with Horizon at all.
Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the community.
It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this pretty closely.
Yes, that would be normal. During an acquisition the future is unknown so you don't have a reliable roadmap you can use to set or update development goals. Other activities that take away from development could be developers working on capability demonstration or participating in technical due diligence.
(I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking generally here)
Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do.
The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail.
Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size.
Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.
Huh. Apache, nginx, php, js, python, Linux, chromium, asterisk, openvpn... list is very very long. Actually I doubt there is more proprietary software that is widely accepted and reliable, than open-source (or even free) software with same achievements.
I hope that RethinkDB (the company) gets acquired. I think the main hurdle for them is that their product is open source.
Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable; the source code or everything else?
Yes and the source (that I've looked at) is high quality. That said, it's a very complicated program with no room for mistakes, and it is written in C++ so plenty of opportunities for memory/pointer issues. RethinkDB is very stable these days, unlike a year ago, and I think it could work well as a full open source project at this point (given the good code quality and docs). Absolutely critical to that would be relicensing everything under a much more liberal license than AGPL!!
Don't want to be accused of being a shill (I'm not, I'm just a fan), but if you're looking for potential alternatives to RethinkDB, Couchbase (the company that was formed when the MemcacheD and CouchDB folks joined forces) offer a totally open source realtime-sync API/SDK (cross-platform: mobile, web, you name it).
Couchbase is a very very different product under the hood. Be aware you have to run Couchbase with their minimum spec cluster requirements ( 3 nodes, tons of CPU and RAM ) just to ensure you don't lose data because it syncs from ram to disk at best every 100ms
The deal-breaker for me with couchbase is that the community edition lags (in terms of bug fixes, security updates, etc) 8-10 months behind their commercially licensed offering.
Ehh, on the Memcached side it was a few contributors (including two major ones, iirc). They're great engineers, but I don't think it's accurate to call them "the Memcached folks".
As far as I know, Memcached's longtime maintainer / primary contributor (dormando) is not involved with Couchbase, and neither is Memcached's original creator (bradfitz).
I had just been evaluating Horizon for a new project using React. It looked very promising but we decided to use Firebase instead, in spite of Firebase being closed source and subject to vendor lock in. We simply couldn't justify forgoing the built in deployment and additional features of Firebase when we are on such a tight time and money budget.
I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.
"Slava @ Rethink here. Unfortunately I cannot comment yet (I really wish I could), but your intuition is right. We're working hard to be able to give a full account ASAP (matter of days). Please stay tuned."
coffeemug|9 years ago
nodesocket|9 years ago
Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire.
I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project.
[1] - https://thinky.io/documentation/
5ersi|9 years ago
Btw, this is our Java ORM built on top of RethinkDB Java driver: https://github.com/DevScore/rethinkdb-java-orm
bcantrill|9 years ago
williamstein|9 years ago
jpgvm|9 years ago
I chose RethinkDB for a core component of a project back in 2013 and really liked it. I think we were probably one of the earliest production adopters but sadly we couldn't talk about it much. I wanted a document store done right and RethinkDB was definitely it.
I hope the OSS project is able to gather steam.
Best of luck Slava.
lima|9 years ago
And I'm only using it for hobby projects. I don't want to use MongoDB.
Thinking about it, I'll just keep using it for now.
patates|9 years ago
Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
bryanlarsen|9 years ago
chanux|9 years ago
tracker1|9 years ago
bbulkow|9 years ago
Don't you see this is self fulfilling?
Don't pay for databases, database companies close.
Or, you can take this as a cautionary tale, and consider paying reasonable, good companies for the technology they create. Not out of pity or charity, simply because you're getting value from the software created.
fweespeech|9 years ago
Please put RethinkDB under the GPL or an even more liberal license?
jamon51|9 years ago
philcockfield|9 years ago
vilterp|9 years ago
eis|9 years ago
Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far.
HN mods: what happened here?
nathancahill|9 years ago
Edit: Here's a semi-buried sctb response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225
benjaminwootton|9 years ago
Are there any circumstances where a company can reasonably go dark for a week?
If it is an acquisition it's pretty disrepectful of people investing in their solution.
wingless|9 years ago
Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until they grow big enough to tank the damage.
rtpg|9 years ago
Things can get difficult in some situations, we're all human. But Joyent going bankrupt wouldn't mean the end of Node. But where is Datomic without Cognitent?
tleyden5iwx|9 years ago
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?
williamstein|9 years ago
istinspring|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
jondubois|9 years ago
The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open source is a low-margin, high volume industry.
These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need to become profitable.
On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are just spamming the internet with their ads.
barrkel|9 years ago
Artemis2|9 years ago
gotofritz|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682
TL;DR a lot of people think there's a secrete acquisition going on and they are doing code evaluation
Ros2|9 years ago
Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the community.
It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this pretty closely.
buskila|9 years ago
lukeholder|9 years ago
mpk|9 years ago
(I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking generally here)
bbulkow|9 years ago
Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys" in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system ) and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the investment community and allows us to fund all that we do.
The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-) ), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes, more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the leader" product planning is a classic fail.
Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size.
Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.
stemuk|9 years ago
craigyk|9 years ago
1. Valuable product maintained by professionals 2. Is free 3. Will be around for a long time
Yes, I know there are exceptions.
EugeneOZ|9 years ago
jondubois|9 years ago
Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable; the source code or everything else?
ddorian43|9 years ago
williamstein|9 years ago
saintfiends|9 years ago
BafS|9 years ago
disordinary|9 years ago
PaulCapestany|9 years ago
Link: http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile
robertjpayne|9 years ago
tepidandroid|9 years ago
evanelias|9 years ago
As far as I know, Memcached's longtime maintainer / primary contributor (dormando) is not involved with Couchbase, and neither is Memcached's original creator (bradfitz).
jakebasile|9 years ago
I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.
mrsteveman1|9 years ago
pas|9 years ago
https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-ab...
That doesn't sound promising :/
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
hoodoof|9 years ago
thejosh|9 years ago
How many frameworks/languages/tools would survive if their parent company disappeared?
I know IO.js was successful when diverging from nodejs (even if they ended up merging again).
diegorbaquero|9 years ago
frankleng|9 years ago
It's not that we are super set on using RethinkDB, but love ReQL! Going back to SQL just seems a huge step back at this point.
tshannon|9 years ago
Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?
shobhitverma|9 years ago
http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sach...
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
nutanc|9 years ago
lvca|9 years ago
[deleted]