19 ms·

RethinkDB needs a new home

302 points by chrisabrams 10y ago

chrisabrams 10y ago
OP here. I'm an open source contributor, not affiliated with RethinkDB Co. I've been using RethinkDB in production for years, and it has been one of the greatest blessings of my engineering career. I am a big believer in RethinkDB and I want to see the project continue forward just like many fellow HN members have expressed in the past few days. I plan to share this with open source foundations to help spark an opportunity to help find RethinkDB a new home. I would encourage constructive communication here. This is about the RethinkDB community working together to help the project end up in a good spot. What foundation or company is not the goal here. Saying this foundation is "good" and another is "bad" is not the goal here. The goal is to work together and make it clear we the community support and thank the RethinkDB team for all of their hard work.
- the_duke 10y ago
  You should probably reach out to RethinkDB and coordinate with them, I'm sure they have plans to keep it going somehow.
  - chrisabrams 10y ago
    I've spoken to Mike. This is my gift to him, Slava, and the rest of the RethinkDB team for all of their hard work. The community is behind them, we're not going to let this project go anywhere!
    - willyk 10y ago
      Amen to that!!
- nailer 10y ago
  Node went to the Linux Foundation which seems to have worked well for the last couple of years.
  - chrisabrams 10y ago
    Node was in a very tough position as the community had actually split into multiple factions. Uniting under a foundation has only strengthened Node's community. We can only hope that RethinkDB's community can use this time to unite together and help push the project forward, no matter where the project ends up.
- willyk 10y ago
  I wish there was a way I could upvote this a lot more than once
- mglukhovsky 10y ago
  Chris, thanks for leading the charge. We're very interested in having RethinkDB join an open-source foundation. I've been overwhelmed (in the best way) by the level of support we've seen from the community in planning RethinkDB's next steps. If you'd like to contribute to the open-source project in any way, let us know [1]. You can also join us in #open-rethinkdb on our public Slack group, where we're starting the planning process. Feel free to reach out to me with ideas and questions. Thanks for all the kind words. [1]: https://goo.gl/forms/tFjI4JI4AvIcPi3D3 https://goo.gl/forms/tFjI4JI4AvIcPi3D3
tbrock 10y ago
Anywhere but Apache please! This product is forward thinking and edgy, not ready to die.
- kimshibal 10y ago
  and google
- liveoneggs 10y ago
  this is a crazy insulting comment
  - sdfsdf343 10y ago
    But also extremely accurate.
    - Touche 10y ago
      CouchDB is far from "dead".
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        I thought when it failed to actually scale, and its fundamental point is scaling, it would be fair to say it was no longer a useful technology?
        SEJeff 10y ago
        CouchDB 2.0 was released (in theory) to fix that long-standing issue with couch.
        rdtsc 10y ago
        > "when it failed to scale" Hmm, well I saw it scale great. It is very much useful to me. It hasn't lost a single write in years since I've been using it. Along with Basho's Riak is probably the only database that has master-to-master replication done right. Has built-in web interface for administration and data viewing. Ok, I'll bite then, so what's "useful" technology?
rattray 10y ago
What a cool effort. I wish this kind of thing happened more often. I really hope they get a big response.
koolba 10y ago
For something like to succeed, you don't need corporate backing or a large structured organization. You need programmers who are familiar with the language (C++?), familiar with the code base, actively interested in adding features, and (preferably) have a vested interest from their day jobs to improve the product. Looking at other open source databases (PG, MariaDb, etc), the total number of contributors may be large but the core contributors who work on the nuts and bolts of the internals is small. If you don't have that core set, any new home for RethinkDB is going to remain vacant.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  This is true, but its really true for almost all tech projects. The core team can make or break things. Hopefully the RethinkDB team has some names in mind.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  RethinkDB would benefit from corporate backing but it needs to be the right sort. I was deeply involved in the MySQL community for a number of years. Both Facebook and Google made significant contributions to the codebase over a number of years and Facebook also funded other open source efforts around MySQL. For instance a lot of the "vested interest" in improving MySQL performance has come from great engineers like Mark Callaghan and Domas Mituzas (hi Domas!) having jobs that paid them to help run MySQL at a grand scale at Facebook.
- zem 10y ago
  a large structured organization would be a clean, formal way for companies to donate money and support to the project
Artemis2 10y ago
Why not the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://cncf.io https://cncf.io)? They manage Kubernetes (cluster orchestration) and recently adopted Prometheus (metric monitoring & alerting). A real-time distributed database as good as RethinkDB could be a great addition, if they are willing to accept it.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bcantrill 10y ago
  I am on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, and speaking personally, I would love to see RethinkDB in the CNCF! I would be happy to champion it, but I already know that the biggest issue is going to be the license: I am hoping that Slava and crew are considering relicensing everything to be under Apache 2.0 -- AGPL is going to make the CNCF path more challenging, I fear.
  - nrser 10y ago
    RethinkDB is AGPL? can you elaborate more on the issues? was planning on using Rethink, and this is making me, well, re-think it. not sure if interpretations have changed in the last six years, but i went through an acquisition with a lot of focus on open source licenses in 2010 and from what i remember AGPL was not something you wanted to have touched with a ten foot ethernet cord if you had any proprietary code - the conservative stance being that AGPL could be read to potentially open source anything that communicated with it. i know that's not how the license is explained or is "supposed to work", but the IP team's explanation (WSGR, seemed to know what they were talking about) is remember it was that copy-left licenses didn't have a lot of case law built up around them to clearly defined their de-facto legal mechanics. if you were a large company like Google, FB, etc., you could pretty much decide how you were going to interpret those licenses because you have the resources to defend those interpretations in court, but as a small company going through an acquisition this was a great way for an acquirer to say "hey, doesn't look like this stuff is really worth all that much because it's potentially all free."
  - rattray 10y ago
jkot 10y ago
Any chance to start a new company? I think original company failed because it had too much overhead (SF office, marketing, investors...) There is a good brand, existing user base, big customers with references... Lean distributed company could make a good profit here with minimal investment.
- mamadrood 10y ago
  I think, sadly, that the only way to save Rethink would be to hire a big marketing team / evangelist team and try to dethrone Mongo. But i don't see that coming.
  - jkot 10y ago
    Could you be more specific? I think path similar to Redis would work just fine.
    - nemothekid 10y ago
      Redis was largely built by one person, and was sponsored by Pivotal. I don't think this would have been attainable.
  - buckbova 10y ago
    mongodb folks are indeed aggressive. I had one person really hounding me to pitch mongodb to my organization basically suggesting it as a huge boon to productivity and it would be trivial to rewrite all our rdbms based apps on top of mongodb. I'm not sure how well they're doing, but some less knowledgeable than I might have taken the bait.
    - iagooar 10y ago
      If it wasn't for aggressive marketing, no one would even consider such a madness.
- jmakeig 10y ago
  Argh! They didn’t charge for the component of their offering that was most valuable. Period. Good software doesn’t pay for itself. Consulting and training are difficult to scale, mostly because they require adding people. As such, the margins are minuscule compared to software. “Free” gets you downloads and publicity, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I really liked Rethink’s story and how well they executed things like branding and developer outreach, but without being able to capture the value of what they were producing it’s hard to see how that’s sustainable.
oh_well 10y ago
As long as RethinkDB is AGPL most will just stick with postgres. Is it possible (or likely) to get the creditors of Rethink to change the license?
- rryan 10y ago
  How many people using RethinkDB are changing its code? AGPL does not mean you have to share the code to your app making use of RethinkDB. AGPL protects against people making hosted forks of RethinkDB and not sharing the changes they've made back to the community.
  - oh_well 10y ago
    > How many people using RethinkDB are changing its code? That's not the point. If you're even using the software the other software components would also be bound by the AGPL license.
    - prawnsalad 10y ago
      That is not correct. Any modifications to the project under the AGPL license need to also be under AGPL. Anything that simply uses the projects APIs is not bound to the same license. If this were not the case, then companies using MongoDB would have to be releasing all their project code, including Google / Ebay / EA / Sage / anyone else listed here: https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb If all these high profile companies are OK with using an AGPL project without turning their projects open source, then I'm sure it's legally fine to do so in practise.
    - noselasd 10y ago
      No. AGPL does not apply to stuff connecting to the program. It gives you the right to the source code of the program if you interact with it remotely through a computer network (directly or indirectly). It does not apply to other software(e.g. a client driver) that connects to tne program.
- Eridrus 10y ago
Artemis2 10y ago
There's a GitHub issue to track the transfer of control of the project: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6137 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6137
jlebrech 10y ago
why not just buy rethinkdb.org or is the trademark now part of Stripe? what about freethinkdb.org?
- tshannon 10y ago
  freethinkdb is a good name, maybe for a future fork :)
  - vacri 10y ago
    'freethink/freethought/freethinker' is a politically-loaded term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
    - jlebrech 10y ago
      it's not a negative term, so what's the problem?
thecity2 10y ago
Why doesn't it become an Apache project?
halite 10y ago
I hope other open source projects are watching this unfold and some good lessons learned come out of this. I don't want this to happen to Meteor!

302 points by chrisabrams 10y ago

OP here. I'm an open source contributor, not affiliated with RethinkDB Co. I've been using RethinkDB in production for years, and it has been one of the greatest blessings of my engineering career. I am a big believer in RethinkDB and I want to see the project continue forward just like many fellow HN members have expressed in the past few days. I plan to share this with open source foundations to help spark an opportunity to help find RethinkDB a new home. I would encourage constructive communication here. This is about the RethinkDB community working together to help the project end up in a good spot. What foundation or company is not the goal here. Saying this foundation is "good" and another is "bad" is not the goal here. The goal is to work together and make it clear we the community support and thank the RethinkDB team for all of their hard work.

the_duke 10y ago
You should probably reach out to RethinkDB and coordinate with them, I'm sure they have plans to keep it going somehow.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  I've spoken to Mike. This is my gift to him, Slava, and the rest of the RethinkDB team for all of their hard work. The community is behind them, we're not going to let this project go anywhere!
  - willyk 10y ago
    Amen to that!!
nailer 10y ago
Node went to the Linux Foundation which seems to have worked well for the last couple of years.
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  Node was in a very tough position as the community had actually split into multiple factions. Uniting under a foundation has only strengthened Node's community. We can only hope that RethinkDB's community can use this time to unite together and help push the project forward, no matter where the project ends up.
willyk 10y ago
I wish there was a way I could upvote this a lot more than once
mglukhovsky 10y ago
Chris, thanks for leading the charge. We're very interested in having RethinkDB join an open-source foundation. I've been overwhelmed (in the best way) by the level of support we've seen from the community in planning RethinkDB's next steps. If you'd like to contribute to the open-source project in any way, let us know [1]. You can also join us in #open-rethinkdb on our public Slack group, where we're starting the planning process. Feel free to reach out to me with ideas and questions. Thanks for all the kind words. [1]: https://goo.gl/forms/tFjI4JI4AvIcPi3D3 https://goo.gl/forms/tFjI4JI4AvIcPi3D3

tbrock 10y ago

Anywhere but Apache please! This product is forward thinking and edgy, not ready to die.

kimshibal 10y ago
and google
liveoneggs 10y ago
this is a crazy insulting comment
- sdfsdf343 10y ago
  But also extremely accurate.
  - Touche 10y ago
    CouchDB is far from "dead".
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      I thought when it failed to actually scale, and its fundamental point is scaling, it would be fair to say it was no longer a useful technology?
      - SEJeff 10y ago
        CouchDB 2.0 was released (in theory) to fix that long-standing issue with couch.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        > "when it failed to scale" Hmm, well I saw it scale great. It is very much useful to me. It hasn't lost a single write in years since I've been using it. Along with Basho's Riak is probably the only database that has master-to-master replication done right. Has built-in web interface for administration and data viewing. Ok, I'll bite then, so what's "useful" technology?

rattray 10y ago

What a cool effort. I wish this kind of thing happened more often. I really hope they get a big response.

koolba 10y ago

For something like to succeed, you don't need corporate backing or a large structured organization. You need programmers who are familiar with the language (C++?), familiar with the code base, actively interested in adding features, and (preferably) have a vested interest from their day jobs to improve the product. Looking at other open source databases (PG, MariaDb, etc), the total number of contributors may be large but the core contributors who work on the nuts and bolts of the internals is small. If you don't have that core set, any new home for RethinkDB is going to remain vacant.

chrisabrams 10y ago
This is true, but its really true for almost all tech projects. The core team can make or break things. Hopefully the RethinkDB team has some names in mind.
hodgesrm 10y ago
RethinkDB would benefit from corporate backing but it needs to be the right sort. I was deeply involved in the MySQL community for a number of years. Both Facebook and Google made significant contributions to the codebase over a number of years and Facebook also funded other open source efforts around MySQL. For instance a lot of the "vested interest" in improving MySQL performance has come from great engineers like Mark Callaghan and Domas Mituzas (hi Domas!) having jobs that paid them to help run MySQL at a grand scale at Facebook.
zem 10y ago
a large structured organization would be a clean, formal way for companies to donate money and support to the project

Artemis2 10y ago

Why not the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://cncf.io https://cncf.io)? They manage Kubernetes (cluster orchestration) and recently adopted Prometheus (metric monitoring & alerting). A real-time distributed database as good as RethinkDB could be a great addition, if they are willing to accept it.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bcantrill 10y ago
I am on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee, and speaking personally, I would love to see RethinkDB in the CNCF! I would be happy to champion it, but I already know that the biggest issue is going to be the license: I am hoping that Slava and crew are considering relicensing everything to be under Apache 2.0 -- AGPL is going to make the CNCF path more challenging, I fear.
- nrser 10y ago
  RethinkDB is AGPL? can you elaborate more on the issues? was planning on using Rethink, and this is making me, well, re-think it. not sure if interpretations have changed in the last six years, but i went through an acquisition with a lot of focus on open source licenses in 2010 and from what i remember AGPL was not something you wanted to have touched with a ten foot ethernet cord if you had any proprietary code - the conservative stance being that AGPL could be read to potentially open source anything that communicated with it. i know that's not how the license is explained or is "supposed to work", but the IP team's explanation (WSGR, seemed to know what they were talking about) is remember it was that copy-left licenses didn't have a lot of case law built up around them to clearly defined their de-facto legal mechanics. if you were a large company like Google, FB, etc., you could pretty much decide how you were going to interpret those licenses because you have the resources to defend those interpretations in court, but as a small company going through an acquisition this was a great way for an acquirer to say "hey, doesn't look like this stuff is really worth all that much because it's potentially all free."
- rattray 10y ago

jkot 10y ago

Any chance to start a new company? I think original company failed because it had too much overhead (SF office, marketing, investors...) There is a good brand, existing user base, big customers with references... Lean distributed company could make a good profit here with minimal investment.

mamadrood 10y ago
I think, sadly, that the only way to save Rethink would be to hire a big marketing team / evangelist team and try to dethrone Mongo. But i don't see that coming.
- jkot 10y ago
  Could you be more specific? I think path similar to Redis would work just fine.
  - nemothekid 10y ago
    Redis was largely built by one person, and was sponsored by Pivotal. I don't think this would have been attainable.
- buckbova 10y ago
  mongodb folks are indeed aggressive. I had one person really hounding me to pitch mongodb to my organization basically suggesting it as a huge boon to productivity and it would be trivial to rewrite all our rdbms based apps on top of mongodb. I'm not sure how well they're doing, but some less knowledgeable than I might have taken the bait.
  - iagooar 10y ago
    If it wasn't for aggressive marketing, no one would even consider such a madness.
jmakeig 10y ago
Argh! They didn’t charge for the component of their offering that was most valuable. Period. Good software doesn’t pay for itself. Consulting and training are difficult to scale, mostly because they require adding people. As such, the margins are minuscule compared to software. “Free” gets you downloads and publicity, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I really liked Rethink’s story and how well they executed things like branding and developer outreach, but without being able to capture the value of what they were producing it’s hard to see how that’s sustainable.

oh_well 10y ago

As long as RethinkDB is AGPL most will just stick with postgres. Is it possible (or likely) to get the creditors of Rethink to change the license?

rryan 10y ago
How many people using RethinkDB are changing its code? AGPL does not mean you have to share the code to your app making use of RethinkDB. AGPL protects against people making hosted forks of RethinkDB and not sharing the changes they've made back to the community.
- oh_well 10y ago
  > How many people using RethinkDB are changing its code? That's not the point. If you're even using the software the other software components would also be bound by the AGPL license.
  - prawnsalad 10y ago
    That is not correct. Any modifications to the project under the AGPL license need to also be under AGPL. Anything that simply uses the projects APIs is not bound to the same license. If this were not the case, then companies using MongoDB would have to be releasing all their project code, including Google / Ebay / EA / Sage / anyone else listed here: https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb https://www.mongodb.com/who-uses-mongodb If all these high profile companies are OK with using an AGPL project without turning their projects open source, then I'm sure it's legally fine to do so in practise.
  - noselasd 10y ago
    No. AGPL does not apply to stuff connecting to the program. It gives you the right to the source code of the program if you interact with it remotely through a computer network (directly or indirectly). It does not apply to other software(e.g. a client driver) that connects to tne program.
Eridrus 10y ago

Artemis2 10y ago

There's a GitHub issue to track the transfer of control of the project: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6137 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6137

jlebrech 10y ago

why not just buy rethinkdb.org or is the trademark now part of Stripe? what about freethinkdb.org?

tshannon 10y ago
freethinkdb is a good name, maybe for a future fork :)
- vacri 10y ago
  'freethink/freethought/freethinker' is a politically-loaded term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
  - jlebrech 10y ago
    it's not a negative term, so what's the problem?

thecity2 10y ago

Why doesn't it become an Apache project?

halite 10y ago

I hope other open source projects are watching this unfold and some good lessons learned come out of this. I don't want this to happen to Meteor!