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Comment by coffeemug | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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.

:) 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 :)

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.

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.

Now that RethinkDB has no commercial ambitions, will you consider re-licensing to more commercial friendly license?

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.

RethinkDB is licensed AGPL, not GPL.

That's an unfortunate license choice. No one will use it.

Not sure about no one but anything with gpl in the license is surely a dead end for some of us.

Affero General Public License is much more restrictive than GPL. People are not comfortable using it in a commercial setting.

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.

> Proprietary software is not by definition "user-hostile,"

Yes, it is: by definition it violates one of the Four Freedoms of users … which is hostile.

Just because your chosen religion says something is evil doesn't make it so. You're speaking tautologically.

Let's apply the Ferrengi Rules of Acquisition or Sun Tzu's Art of War to software licenses!

The Four Freedoms are just someone's opinion, not some tangible fact.

I disagree. Most of those are things that most users don't give a damn about in most cases (because they're meaningless unless you have certain unusual skills), which means they don't make for a sensible definition of "hostile".

Do pirate bay support your statement or proof that it is wrong? Maybe it just that "most users don't give a damn" about copyright, and as such don't care if what they do is legal or illegal with current copyright laws. In order to care about copyright licenses, first users need to care about what happens when they don't follow it.

I can see why you're sometimes labeled as "fanatics" and "zealots". You speak in religious-like absolute terms and use circular logic to "prove" you're correct. The GPL's biggest enemy are its most ardent supporters. Truly.

So you care more about having the entire pie, than about how much pie you have?

If you have a license that "permits" commercial sales in a way that by design makes most business models completely unfeasible... guess what? You'll only get contributions from those with one of the handful of blessed business models. Which will work or not depending on what sorts of businesses models your project is suited for.

Copyleft works fine for things like the kernel that are complementary to tons of different expensive things and nobody cares about otherwise. Permissive works well for Postgres.

At the same time, you're arguing that you should be able to take the work they've done, add to it, but not give back, despite having received a HUGE base to start with.

It's licensed under the Affero GPLv3, but I don't think AGPL license requires you to open source your code, if you're just using ReQL (the API/interface for RethinkDB).

GPL/AGPL requires you to share your code if you statically (or dynamically) link (which is a C language family concept) to GPL code, but I don't know if calling an API is considered "linking".

I don't think most companies really make any contributions or modifications to the databases they use that they absolutely do not want to share back to the community.

(If using ReQL constitutes "linking" under AGPLv3, then that's a very serious matter. Perhaps re-licensing under LGPLv3 would make sense then.)

But overall, I think it's fair that they used AGPL. I especially like that they opted for the Affero version, since companies that do make useful changes can't just hold onto it , and not share it back.

I've worked in a project that used some AGPL component. There were some many doubts on what should be open-sourced/which licenses were possible that we dropped that component and invested or time modification another one.

After some while, that component changed its licensing model. It was too late.

Exactly, I call the AGPL anxiety license. It create so much problem in the mindset that is VERY commercial unfriendly.

I wish you would just consider a 2 clause bsd license and end all debate and worry about licensing issues. But it's your code.

Will Stripe allow your team to continue working maybe even on a part-time (20% time or 50% time) basis on RethinkDB inside Stripe?

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