RethinkDB needs a new home
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
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.
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.
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.
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."
> Require users who are unwilling to release the patches to the software development community to purchase a commercial license.
It definitely looks like they'd be willing, if not eager, to relicense to a less commercially-motivated server now that the company is shutting down. Obviously we'll have to wait and see.
Note for posterity and the lazy, the client drivers are Apache v2.
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.
Hopefully the RethinkDB team has some names in mind.
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.
There is a good brand, existing user base, big customers with references...
Lean distributed company could make a good profit here with minimal investment.
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.
Anyway, the company is wound down and the team has moved on. None of this speculation matters anymore.
Is it possible (or likely) to get the creditors of Rethink to change the license?
AGPL protects against people making hosted forks of RethinkDB and not sharing the changes they've made back to the community.
That's not the point. If you're even using the software the other software components would also be bound by the AGPL license.
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
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.
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.
I don't know if this is a sound legal interpretation of the AGPL though. My obvious concern would be that the AGPL extends to the rest of our production code.
Exactly. AGPL was explicitly created to make all clients of the software be bound by its license. To say that the drivers have a different license makes no sense at all.
huh? AGPL puts no requirements on clients of the software. Otherwise I wouldn't be allowed to use IE to connect to AGPL webapps. AGPL puts extra requirements on people using the software on servers.
Maybe I am misunderstanding it, but I would want a lawyer to tell me that before using any AGPL code.
My understanding is that it somewhat extends the concept of "distributing" to providing remote access over a network:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License."
If someone modify AGPL code, and repackage it, then distribute to clients (AGPL include via network), then they must disclose the source code to clients only.
RethinkDB drivers are in Apache 2.0, which most companies package it in their software and distribute to clients. In this case, the proprietary software need not in AGPL. This is why drivers are in Apache 2.0.
You only concern AGPL when you want modify, repackage it, then distribute it (include via network) to clients WITHOUT disclose source code. If yes, you are in 0.1% of minority that want compete directly with RethinkDB using RethinkDB.
You've probably heard that the difference between the GPL and the AGPL is whether they apply to access over a network or not; but you seem to have misinterpreted how that works. The GPL says that if you modify GPL-licensed software and distribute compiled binaries to users, you must also distribute the source code under the GPL. The AGPL says the same thing as the GPL, except that making the modified software available over the network is treated the same as distributing the modified software as a compiled binary.
I've read the AGPL license. I disagree with your interpretation.
> The RethinkDB server is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The client drivers are licensed under the Apache License v2.0.
> We chose to release the client drivers under the Apache License v2.0 to remove any ambiguity as to the extent of the server license. You do not have to license any software that uses RethinkDB under AGPL, and are free to use any licensing mechanism of your choice.
I think partially that's caused by convoluted and imprecise language in the AGPL. E.g what clause 13) means for something like a database product is pretty much unclear.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html :
> Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Not fan of MongoDB.
Neo4j (enterprise edition)
https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j
Ghostscript
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_under_the_GNU...
what about freethinkdb.org?
This product is forward thinking and edgy, not ready to die.
Sadly there's also a large number of projects that have just been thrown under the Apache hat, assuming that the foundation would somehow allocate developers. So it often seems like Apache is the place where projects go to die, while the projects that do well aren't often viewed as Apache projects. I mean who thinks about Hadoop being and Apache project?
I think most people misunderstand the ASF. It is not meant to be the home for every software project. It is meant to be the home for projects that care about community and long term stewardship. By long term, I mean, more like 100 years than the next 10 months.
It has successful projects, and failures. Maybe it should be more vocal about the successes, but Apache isn't. The foundation isn't flashy. It isn't "hip". It shouldn't be. It's supposed to outlast the corporations we think about today as giants.
(I'm an ASF member)
I think the point that's being made is that a home in a neighborhood full of foreclosures and zombie properties winds up losing a lot of its value.
I wouldn't describe it as a "neighborhood full of foreclosures and zombie properties". Yes, theres been a bunch of drama around OpenOffice, but many projects are doing great.
That really my point. I don't think that any project has ever failed because it was adopted by Apache, but the foundation has adopted some hopeless cases and they seem to get most of the focus.
Back in the day, providing hosting space was really a big deal, but nowadays, with GitHub, GitLab, or SF, why put a project on the ASF rather than just dump the code to GiHub with an Apache license?
Why do you need one?
What will happen if you just build a community around github (especially an Apache-licensed project which doesn't have licencing enforcement issues found in copyleft code)
Not quite... instead, Apache has been used by some projects to give it a "kick-in-the-pants" and a renewed opportunity to grow and thrive. The ASF wouldn't take on any "dumped" project unless that opportunity was there. It's what the whole Incubation process is about. Sure, sometimes it doesn't pan out, but that is far from it being a place where projects "go to die".
As far as "who thinks about Hadoop ... being ... Apache", well, everyone should. We kind of stress that people correctly make such attributions. As someone who clearly knows that Hadoop is under the ASF, you, for example, instead of perputuating FUD about Apache could be reminding people about the slew of incredibly successful, innovative and forward-think projects that live there.
http://mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/getting-started...
./configure --without-java
I'm a little annoyed to have to be worrying about upgrading now, but there apparently are worse organizational structures for supporting an OSS project than a hands off non profit.
There's a word for unjustified confidence.