Open-RethinkDB meeting notes #4 | Hacker News Reader

Open-RethinkDB meeting notes #4

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News: "Our initial plan was to acquire the intellectual property left over from the RethinkDB company, enabling us to relicense the code and use the name RethinkDB. After aggressively pursuing this plan since the company shut down in September, little progress has been made." Dang.

I wonder what the offer amount is/was.

Unrelated - I personally tried to broker an offer (with an investor I know), but nobody would respond to me. It's too late now, since we're switching to PostgreSQL asap....

This is why we can't have nice things.

People! Answer your emails!

Silence means the answer was no.

From this point of view, it would have been better if the company had gone bankrupt.

I don't think an offer amount was made. As far as I can tell there is no significant money or even organization in the group of people that are doing their best to manage the project. They're still looking for a way to formalize. I would read this as that stakeholders have not been eager to donate the RethinkDB IP to a foundation, so perhaps there either are commercial parties interested in the IP, or the stakeholders think there might be.

This is all conjecture though, unfortunately besides these meeting notes there is no record of interactions with the RethinkDB stakeholders.

So you've got this thing that's of non-zero value. Because the company shut down, and didn't get acquired, it's probably still owned by a largish number of folks. Getting the right approval to sell it for a song would seem tricky without majority shareholders being really into the idea.

Yeah, it's hard. I worked on a video game that was canceled 16 years ago, and only recently released in unfinished form. It was very difficult to get consensus among the team to allow a release, and ultimately we had to settle on a non-free license (CC non-commercial. better than nothing).

We had some commercial offers, but they were low enough that it made it seem like we could seek a better offer, even though no such better offers really exist. I can easily see the same thing happening with RethinkDB:

Buyer: I'll give $10K for all of RethinkDB's IP.

Owners: LOL, no thanks. You know how much we spent building this?

Buyer: I'll give you $100K.

Owners: Ehh starting to turn into real money, maybe we'll hold out for a bigger number?

Buyer: I'll give you $1M!

Owners: Now we're talking! But, no. Surely if you'll offer this much, there's someone to beat it. Let's go looking.

I don't see a way out...

Fortunately, they picked a FOSS license. As much as people like to gripe on the AGPL, we have code we can freely modify and use, even commercially. That's pretty awesome, and more than I can say about my much less valuable video game.

Imagine trying to move a couch with your hands tied behind your back. That is how it has been for us the past few months. Good things coming soon though.

> I would read this as that stakeholders have not been eager to donate the RethinkDB IP to a foundation, so perhaps there either are commercial parties interested in the IP, or the stakeholders think there might be.

Can't blame them. I'd do the same thing as an investor.

The only way this IP will be open sourced would be if the purchaser of the IP chooses to do so.

That would be like a Lamborghini dealership trying to squeeze an extra hundred bucks from a $2K '94 Dogde Colt that by some happenstance came into their possession. There is no rational justification for this course of action.

EDIT: except a new Lamborghini is only two orders of magnitude more valuable than a '94 Colt, a successful startup is five to eight orders of magnitude more valuable than a failed one.

It's very rational when you play multiple games.

I don't see the issue with using the name? From what I've read there is no trademark, which means no legal baggage with the name.

And the code is Free Software, so there is no requirement to take licensing ownership for the project to continue. It is probably better that they can't as that means it is practically impossible to close source it.

They want to change the license.

For many of the foundations we've spoken to, we would need to change the license.

As a member of the TOC of the CNCF, I'm happy to advocate getting RethinkDB in the CNCF now and changing the license later -- I would love to get RethinkDB in the CNCF!

Just curious - why AGPL doesn't fit them? Not implying anything, just wonder about possible cases.

Because AGPL is so highly restrictive that most OSS foundations won't have projects use it - they prefer the far more permissive Apache/MIT/BSD licenses

Yes, I've heard similar things. But they're really generic - that's why I've asked.

I was wondering if there are somewhat more concrete examples. Like... some specific use cases and clauses that conflict with them.

Let's pretend your sponsoring entity makes a security or search appliance (anything from a google mini to a NAT/firewall) - AGPL code shipped on that appliance requires publishing source. Depending on how it's intertwined in the product, that may mean shipping source for the whole product

Apache / MIT / BSD have no such restrictions - Apache httpd is on a ton of appliances for that reason

I'm 100% certain Software Freedom Conservancy would not require a license change.

That's a weird statement given that this group are mostly former RethinkDB folks.

This project is just too awesome to let die, I hope it continues development for years to come.

The investors should get an automatic tax benefit for releasing the IP into the public domain. There are great companies that you've never heard of that die every day and nothing ever happens to their IP. It's a massive economic waste.

They already get a tax benefit when they write the investment off...

That doesn't release the IP into the public domain. The issue is that it's in a zombie state that creates liability / uncertainty for anyone that wants to use it.

Great to see RethinkDB as a project is pushing forward. My concern is about product and code quality with the core founders and engineers leaving for Stripe. I'm sure the open source contributors are great, but do we really think they will do as fantastic of a job as coffeemug, mglukhovsky, and danielmewes? Especially now, since the financial motivations are essentially removed.

I can confidently say that there is much more than $$ driving the individuals that made this wonderful product. (I did not work at RethinkDB).

Very happy to see progress being made. There is nothing comparable to RethinkDB changefeeds out there.

Oh wow, 2.4 is out next week? I thought we're stuck with 2.3 for a long time. Top 1 daily Hacker News submission incoming.

Awrsome!

I'm worried about this being posted on Google Docs. What happens when Google Docs gets shut down or migrated into some sort of other service and this document is not migrated? This sort of thing should be on a mailing list, methinks.

You mean because you think that a service with 3 million paying organizations and the core part of Google's strategy to get greater adoption in enterprise and schools is going to disappear?

It's possible, but what I'm actually thinking about is more along the lines of lock-in. For instance, Writely, which was the service Google bought to make it into Google Docs, had a migration period where, before you opened a document in Google Docs, you had to convert it to the new format. It's a form of bit rot. Over time, stuff on proprietary services become less and less useful.

I tried archiving this Open-RethinkDB meeting notes document using archive.is (a very common archiving service) and you can see the output is broken so you can't archive it: https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%...

Ask: How will we read this in 10 years?

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