Is Basho dead? | Hacker News Reader

Is Basho dead?

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67 pointsokket9 comments

I was a Riak user for a long time and I interfaced with a lot of the Basho team. While Riak was indeed flawed in many ways, the people that worked at Basho were just fantastic. Some of their distributed systems engineers were the best in the world.

The drama at the top is what ultimately killed the company, IMHO. It was a total bummer to watch it go down in flames the way it did.

Story time?

Not my story to tell. I'm sure someone else has told it...or will.

Very interested

Me too. I think we all have our own stories about Basho's demise. Some people left early, some hung on until the end, but IMO it stopped being the Basho it once was (the "mythical basho") around the all hands in Estes Park in 2014. The first and biggest exodus was 2014/2015. I clung on until 2017. Even managed to squeak out a few bits of decent work in that time, but the writing was on the wall from 2014 IMO. When Basho finally dies (rather than this weird ghost ship/zombie shell company that remains) and all looming threats of litigation are gone I think it would do me good to write my view of the story from 2011. Right now I'm focussing on how to keep working on Riak, because it's still a great piece of software with a very wide deployment of active users.

If I remember correctly their entire engineering team walked out months ago.

Some of them are now working at VMware and using Rust to build things like https://github.com/vmware/haret

Had a friend who worked at Basho on Riak until the layoffs, didn't realize that there was a diaspora at VMware. Our next Boston Rust meetup happens to be at VMware, maybe I'll ask them how they think Rust compares to Erlang. :P

Ouch, looks like he's right: https://github.com/basho/riak/pulse/monthly .

Basho as we know it? Sadly, yes. Aiui the name and tech will live on but, let's face it, the basho most people knew died a couple of years back.

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