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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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