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RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a da

by pc 10y ago

RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a database could be and how it should work. I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort. I'm also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we've gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Rethinks -- and shared some of our plans with them and gotten their feedback -- we've become pretty convinced that we can build some excellent products together in the future. I'm looking forward to learning from all of them. [1] (And, for me, even before Stripe -- I started learning Haskell with Slava's Lisp-interpreter-in-Haskell tutorial back in 2006... http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html)

heyts 10y ago
As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product. On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/ https://changelog.com/114/
- coffeemug 10y ago
  Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
  - api 10y ago
    That is very good to hear. We just ported our backend to use it after evaluating many other options including managed databases. It's really a top quality piece of software in every respect, combining much of what's good about nosql with relational features and robustness. The ease of clustering across data centers is just phenomenal. Would still recommend it in spite of this bit of uncertainty.
  - desireco42 10y ago
    I can't describe how sad I am over this. RethinkDB is not just excellent db, but it is yardstick on how future db's should look like. What you accomplished there is excellent balance on features, great ui. We really need this project to go on, even if slower.
    - nailer 10y ago
      We use RethinkDB at CertSimple. It's always been a great DB with safe defaults, excellent documentation and it's always just worked. Trickier ReQL queries are intuitive. It deserved wider support than what it got.
      - api 10y ago
        It's depressing that a half-baked constantly problematic effort like MongoDB wins while this gets neglected. Unfortunately we still live in a world where marketing beats merit.
        desireco42 10y ago
        :) You nailed it. I think MongoDB was interesting experiment and can be used, but RethinkDB shows you how it should be done right. MySQL was for long time default choice over PgSQL, yet once developers matured, quality won. Just it took a decade :)
        Grishnakh 10y ago
        It's always like this. Just look at Windows; if people cared about quality, no one would be complaining about Windows 10 giving them grief because Microsoft would be out of business or relegated to some business software niche, and we'd all be running some kind of Unix variant or maybe some descendant of BeOS or OS/2.
  - tamalsaha001 10y ago
    Now that RethinkDB has no commercial ambitions, will you consider re-licensing to more commercial friendly license?
    - zeveb 10y ago
      The GPL is of course completely commerce-friendly, as it permits anyone to resell the original or modifications to it. What you're asking for is a license friendly to proprietary software[1]. Why on earth would they want to enable someone to close his modifications to RethinkDB? How does that make the world a better place? How does that encourage the growth of RethinkDB (vice the proliferation of closed, proprietary forks of RethinkDB)? [1] Which is to say, user-hostile software. Users should be free to use, modify & distribute software.
      - oomkiller 10y ago
        RethinkDB is licensed AGPL, not GPL.
        oh_well 10y ago
        That's an unfortunate license choice. No one will use it.
        X86BSD 10y ago
        Not sure about no one but anything with gpl in the license is surely a dead end for some of us.
        oh_well 10y ago
        Affero General Public License is much more restrictive than GPL. People are not comfortable using it in a commercial setting.
      - pc86 10y ago
        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.
  - winter_blue 10y ago
    Will Stripe allow your team to continue working maybe even on a part-time (20% time or 50% time) basis on RethinkDB inside Stripe?
dieselz 10y ago
I believe the RethinkDB team will be a great fit for Stripe. RethinkDB was literally a pleasure to work with. As someone who has had to endure the pain of setting up a production mongo environment, I was thrilled to see how easy RethinkDB was to provision and then configure (all in their beautiful dashboard). I see a lot of similarities between Stripe's offering and RethinkDB, making a once painful process into one that is actually looked forward to when building a new product. I'm glad Stripe will have even more engineering firepower as they continue to succeed. Sad that RethinkDB(.com) is no more, but happy they found a great company to join!
kepano 10y ago
It's great to hear that the Rethink crew will have a home at Stripe. Seems like the perfect fit. I hope you consider putting resources behind the project. We've absolutely loved using at Lumi.
carsongross 10y ago
The comments section here can be brutal and God knows I've been responsible for some of it, which makes seeing comments like this all the more heartening.
- codecamper 10y ago
  No need to ask God. Just pull up the history. ;)
nodesocket 10y ago
Patrick, I am curious why Stripe didn't just acquire RethinkDB completely? Seems like you could have gotten a bargain. Their investors get some money back, you'd get their excellent intellectual property, and finally the entire functioning RethinkDB team joins Stripe. Win-win right?
- pavlov 10y ago
  The IP is open source, and Stripe owes nothing to RethinkDB's investors. Why buy something you can have for free?
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    There might still be copyrights, trademarks, domains (and even patents).
    - troymc 10y ago
      The copyrights and patents are already covered under the licenses they used (AGPL v3 and Apache v2). A search for RETHINKDB on the USPTO trademark search engine turns up no results.
  - orblivion 10y ago
    Just a hypothetical - if you actually own the IP, you may be able to release future versions under non-free licenses. However I don't see Stripe in the premium-DB business.
    - ithkuil 10y ago
      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_source_licenses/ 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.
m3kw9 10y ago
Oh, that's why it got shut down. Thanks
chanux 10y ago
I secretly (not 'secret' anymore I guess) and irrationally trust Stripe to do good on RethinkDB. Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco. Yeah defmarco, that's how I read it for a long time. I especially love this piece from defmarco http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html
- patates 10y ago
  > Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco Just another +1 to the "OMG it's him/her?" moments regularly experience while reading HN. Thanks for mentioning.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelmior 10y ago
  s/defmarco/defmacro/
amelius 10y ago
Just out of interest, are you using Haskell at Stripe? If so, at what scale?
bryanlarsen 10y ago
"we can build some excellent products together in the future." So in other words you're not going to continue to work on Horizon and Rethink, or at least if you do they are secondary priorities? Ugh. Slava did the right thing; his first responsibility is to his employees, not his users, but this really sucks for us users. For us, it would probably have been better to shut down abruptly. The community would have scrambled. Some employees would find work in companies that used RethinkDB, and maintenance would have continued the same way that Apache was developed ~20 years ago. Some would have grabbed support contracts from users. And some would have moved on.

by pc 10y ago

heyts 10y ago

As a user and supporter of RethinkDB I hope (and expect!) that the engineering team joining Stripe is a sign that Stripe will be able to take part in further development of the product. On a sidenote, for people unfamiliar with RethinkDB, this episode of The Changelog with Slava explains some of the history and choices behind RethinkDB ; I found it really interesting. https://changelog.com/114/ https://changelog.com/114/

coffeemug 10y ago
Slava @ Rethink here. The team at Stripe has been absolutely phenomenal throughout this process, they've gone above and beyond in finding high-impact projects for our team. We're brainstorming together how to transition RethinkDB to a self-sustaining open-source project, and Stripe is super-supportive of that too. If there is a way for RethinkDB to live on, we'll find it!
- api 10y ago
  That is very good to hear. We just ported our backend to use it after evaluating many other options including managed databases. It's really a top quality piece of software in every respect, combining much of what's good about nosql with relational features and robustness. The ease of clustering across data centers is just phenomenal. Would still recommend it in spite of this bit of uncertainty.
- desireco42 10y ago
  I can't describe how sad I am over this. RethinkDB is not just excellent db, but it is yardstick on how future db's should look like. What you accomplished there is excellent balance on features, great ui. We really need this project to go on, even if slower.
  - nailer 10y ago
    We use RethinkDB at CertSimple. It's always been a great DB with safe defaults, excellent documentation and it's always just worked. Trickier ReQL queries are intuitive. It deserved wider support than what it got.
    - api 10y ago
      It's depressing that a half-baked constantly problematic effort like MongoDB wins while this gets neglected. Unfortunately we still live in a world where marketing beats merit.
      - desireco42 10y ago
        :) You nailed it. I think MongoDB was interesting experiment and can be used, but RethinkDB shows you how it should be done right. MySQL was for long time default choice over PgSQL, yet once developers matured, quality won. Just it took a decade :)
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        It's always like this. Just look at Windows; if people cared about quality, no one would be complaining about Windows 10 giving them grief because Microsoft would be out of business or relegated to some business software niche, and we'd all be running some kind of Unix variant or maybe some descendant of BeOS or OS/2.
- tamalsaha001 10y ago
  Now that RethinkDB has no commercial ambitions, will you consider re-licensing to more commercial friendly license?
  - zeveb 10y ago
    The GPL is of course completely commerce-friendly, as it permits anyone to resell the original or modifications to it. What you're asking for is a license friendly to proprietary software[1]. Why on earth would they want to enable someone to close his modifications to RethinkDB? How does that make the world a better place? How does that encourage the growth of RethinkDB (vice the proliferation of closed, proprietary forks of RethinkDB)? [1] Which is to say, user-hostile software. Users should be free to use, modify & distribute software.
    - oomkiller 10y ago
      RethinkDB is licensed AGPL, not GPL.
      - oh_well 10y ago
        That's an unfortunate license choice. No one will use it.
        X86BSD 10y ago
        Not sure about no one but anything with gpl in the license is surely a dead end for some of us.
        oh_well 10y ago
        Affero General Public License is much more restrictive than GPL. People are not comfortable using it in a commercial setting.
    - pc86 10y ago
      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.
- winter_blue 10y ago
  Will Stripe allow your team to continue working maybe even on a part-time (20% time or 50% time) basis on RethinkDB inside Stripe?

dieselz 10y ago

I believe the RethinkDB team will be a great fit for Stripe. RethinkDB was literally a pleasure to work with. As someone who has had to endure the pain of setting up a production mongo environment, I was thrilled to see how easy RethinkDB was to provision and then configure (all in their beautiful dashboard). I see a lot of similarities between Stripe's offering and RethinkDB, making a once painful process into one that is actually looked forward to when building a new product. I'm glad Stripe will have even more engineering firepower as they continue to succeed. Sad that RethinkDB(.com) is no more, but happy they found a great company to join!

kepano 10y ago

It's great to hear that the Rethink crew will have a home at Stripe. Seems like the perfect fit. I hope you consider putting resources behind the project. We've absolutely loved using at Lumi.

carsongross 10y ago

The comments section here can be brutal and God knows I've been responsible for some of it, which makes seeing comments like this all the more heartening.

codecamper 10y ago
No need to ask God. Just pull up the history. ;)

nodesocket 10y ago

Patrick, I am curious why Stripe didn't just acquire RethinkDB completely? Seems like you could have gotten a bargain. Their investors get some money back, you'd get their excellent intellectual property, and finally the entire functioning RethinkDB team joins Stripe. Win-win right?

pavlov 10y ago
The IP is open source, and Stripe owes nothing to RethinkDB's investors. Why buy something you can have for free?
- reitanqild 10y ago
  There might still be copyrights, trademarks, domains (and even patents).
  - troymc 10y ago
    The copyrights and patents are already covered under the licenses they used (AGPL v3 and Apache v2). A search for RETHINKDB on the USPTO trademark search engine turns up no results.
- orblivion 10y ago
  Just a hypothetical - if you actually own the IP, you may be able to release future versions under non-free licenses. However I don't see Stripe in the premium-DB business.
  - ithkuil 10y ago
    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_source_licenses/ 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.

m3kw9 10y ago

Oh, that's why it got shut down. Thanks

chanux 10y ago

I secretly (not 'secret' anymore I guess) and irrationally trust Stripe to do good on RethinkDB. Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco. Yeah defmarco, that's how I read it for a long time. I especially love this piece from defmarco http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

patates 10y ago
> Also, TIL: Slava is defmarco Just another +1 to the "OMG it's him/her?" moments regularly experience while reading HN. Thanks for mentioning.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
michaelmior 10y ago
s/defmarco/defmacro/

amelius 10y ago

Just out of interest, are you using Haskell at Stripe? If so, at what scale?

bryanlarsen 10y ago

"we can build some excellent products together in the future." So in other words you're not going to continue to work on Horizon and Rethink, or at least if you do they are secondary priorities? Ugh. Slava did the right thing; his first responsibility is to his employees, not his users, but this really sucks for us users. For us, it would probably have been better to shut down abruptly. The community would have scrambled. Some employees would find work in companies that used RethinkDB, and maintenance would have continued the same way that Apache was developed ~20 years ago. Some would have grabbed support contracts from users. And some would have moved on.