[joshberkus]

If you read the shutdown blog post for RethinkDB, licensing was not among their problems. Instead, they were market positioning, reputation, and developing products suitable for their market in a timely fashion. In other words, business execution.

Believe it or don't, no license, no matter how clever, will allow you to be financially successful if you blow the business execution.

Let's turn this on its head: what was the business plan that RedisLabs re-invented itself under? Was it a good business plan? Is is vulnerability to Amazon/MS that made it fail, or was the plan flawed from the start?