Wow... This comes as a complete stunner. Startups are f'ing hard. You had such a great team and there were no obvious signs or slowing of product development. Literally just came out of nowhere. Anyway, wish you all the best and hopefully someday we can learn all the details of what all went so wrong. The quality and beauty (great design) of RethinkDB is something I will continue to admire.
I'm working on my 3rd startup and heavy into development using Node.js + RethinkDB + Thinky (ORM)[1]. It is a bit relieving to hear that RethinkDB will continue to exist as an open source project.
Btw, this is our Java ORM built on top of RethinkDB Java driver: https://github.com/DevScore/rethinkdb-java-orm
I chose RethinkDB for a core component of a project back in 2013 and really liked it. I think we were probably one of the earliest production adopters but sadly we couldn't talk about it much. I wanted a document store done right and RethinkDB was definitely it.
I hope the OSS project is able to gather steam.
Best of luck Slava.
And I'm only using it for hobby projects. I don't want to use MongoDB.
Thinking about it, I'll just keep using it for now.
Such quality work should not be abandoned! In any case, thank you so much with what you and your team came up with. We (me and my colleagues) respect your work.
Don't you see this is self fulfilling?
Don't pay for databases, database companies close.
Or, you can take this as a cautionary tale, and consider paying reasonable, good companies for the technology they create. Not out of pity or charity, simply because you're getting value from the software created.
Please put RethinkDB under the GPL or an even more liberal license?