> the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software and it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will. I strongly

> the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software and it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will. I strongly disagree with that. Take RavenDB, which is very much comparable to RethinkDB in terms of a business is dual licensed as AGPL and has a commercial license available [1]. This forces any business doing non-OSI approved OSS work to purchase a commercial license. I don't know too much about RethinkDB but I think they must have used a very similar licensing strategy? From an outsiders' perspective, RavenDB appears to be going strong and doing well commercially. They are hiring and expanding and have invested a lot into v.4.0, which I'm really excited about. Interestingly, on the spectrum between MongoDB and RethinkDB in terms of "Wrong metrics of goodness" (Correctness, Simplicity of the Interface) they appear to me much closer to RethinkDB than MongoDB. In terms of stability, they may have been somewhat in the middle (e.g. not as bad as MongoDB, but probably not as good as RethinkDB). And they have moved very fast to add features and fix bugs in the product. It's a really nice DB to work with as a dev, I suppose the #1 reason they are not as successful as Mongo is that they're coming from the .NET niche... [1] https://ayende.com/blog/4508/comments-on-ravendb-licensing https://ayende.com/blog/4508/comments-on-ravendb-licensing