[richardwigley]

Is Rethink going to stay in the community? Or is there a chance that it could be bought out? I don't want to spend time learning something and have it go private like FoundationDB. I'm assuming GNU and Apache is a good thing?

How is RethinkDB licensed?

The RethinkDB server is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The client drivers are licensed under the Apache License v2.0. http://rethinkdb.com/faq/

[coffeemug]

Slava, CEO @ Rethink here. There are two aspects that you should consider.

Firstly, as Daniel pointed out, RethinkDB is licensed under AGPL. An acquirer wouldn't have the legal means to close the source code, and with over 700 forks on GitHub they also couldn't do it practically.

But beyond licensing, consider our personal motivations. We've been working on RethinkDB for five years, and had quite a few opportunities to sell the company. We turned them all down because we really believe in the product. The world is clearly moving towards realtime apps, and we feel it's extremely important for open realtime infrastructure to exist. It's easy for people to make promises about the future, but consider this from a game-theoretic point of view. If we wanted to sell, we could have done it long ago. I know it's not a guarantee, but hopefully it's a strong signal to help with your decision.

(Also, there are lots of really interesting companies building products on RethinkDB that we can't talk publicly about yet. It would be silly to sell given that momentum)

[jwr]

I hear you talk a lot about real-time — I guess that's a niche that you noticed. But let me add to that: being "distributed" without major pain is also big. There is a niche to be filled on the (loosely defined) "distributed" spectrum between, say, Redis and Cassandra, and so far you seem to be heading right for that place. I like that a lot and plan to use RethinkDB for a number of projects in the near future.

[TkTech]

In the unlikely chance that you can talk about future plans, is the idea to commercialize by offering "enterprise" support on top of Rethink, or an extended-feature closed source version, etc...?

At some point people need bread and butter, so I'm curious where that's going to come from :)

<3 Rethink.

[ifcologne]

FoundationDB was a closed-source database. It was never open-source.

They had only open-sourced the SQL-Layer on top of their key/value store and it's still available on Github. The reason: They build it based on open-source code

When someone deletes a public repository on Github, one fork remains as the new master. (Here's FoundationDB's SQL-Layer: https://github.com/louisrli/sql-layer)

So: RethinkDB will stay, even if someone tries to pull the plug. Just fork them on Github. :)

[danielmewes]

Daniel @ RethinkDB here. As you mention, RethinkDB is fully open source so RethinkDB is always going to remain freely available.

[vezzy-fnord]

This does not discount the possibility of a license change after a hypothetical acquisition, however. Though in that case you'll likely get a community fork branching off the upstream proprietary base.

[richardwigley]

Authoritative source of information, thanks ;-) I will evaluate it on my next project.

[Apofis]

Quick question: How would RethinkDB benefit an E-Commerce shop?

[benatkin]

I don't consider the AGPL to be fully open source. To me, it isn't in the spirit of open source.

(BTW the Open Source Institute was unable to get a trademark for "open source" so it doesn't matter that they approved it.)