Fascinating read, albeit a sad one: I love RethinkDB, and use it personally every day in our particular production deployment.[1] But -- and to Slava's point -- we didn't/don't/wouldn't pay for it, and in that regard, we were part of the problem. That said, the constraint on that particular problem was that it had to be open source, and if it couldn't have been RethinkDB, it would have been some other open source database -- proprietary software is a non-option for that use case (or indeed, for any of our use cases).

So I feel Slava's pain (and feel somewhat culpable as a user of RethinkDB), but I don't entirely agree with the analysis. Yes, infrastructure is a brutal space because it has been so thoroughly disrupted by open source -- but the dominance of AWS shows that open source can absolutely be monetized (just that it must be monetized as a service). Indeed, right now, I would love to deploy a RethinkDB-based service -- and if the company still existed, we (and by "we" I mean "we Samsung", not "we Joyent"[2]) would potentially be in a serious business conversation about what a supported, large-scale deployment would look like. Actually, that's not entirely true, and it leads to me to one thing that Slava didn't mention. While it kills me to bring it up, it does represent the single greatest impediment I have personally found to deep, mainstream, enterprise adoption of RethinkDB: its use of the AGPL. Anyone who has been part of a serious due diligence knows that the GPL alone is toxic to much of the enterprise world -- and the GPL is a buttoned-down corporate stooge compared to the virulent, ill-defined, never-tested AGPL. The AGPL is a complete non-starter for any purpose, and while I appreciate why the AGPL was selected by RethinkDB (and very much appreciate the explicit riders that RethinkDB put on it to make clear what it did and didn't apply to), 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 still use RethinkDB and still intend to -- and I still harbor hope (crazily?) that whatever entity that owns the IP will see fit to relicense it to something that is palatable to the kind of people who care about their data. I actually believe that a business can be built on the technology -- which, to Slava's points, I have found to be delightfully sound in both design and implementation. And that RethinkDB is open source means -- for us, anyway -- it will continue to live on, despite the unfortunate demise of its corporate vessel (AGPL or no). That said, I would love to have a lot more company -- here's hoping that we see RethinkDB relicensed and a thriving business behind it!

[1] https://github.com/joyent/manta-thoth

[2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...