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Comment by rajnathani | Hacker News Reader

The underlying technology [1] for TileDB came up with MIT and Intel working together.

And TileDB, the company, formed out of it, has recently received funding [2] from Intel in Intel's latest tranche of investments.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/stavrosp/papers/vldb2017/VLDB17...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/19/data-is-the-name-of-the-ga...

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Good to know private shareholders are getting even richer off all that taxpayer research money that's pumped into MIT.

Given that this is an open-source project, Intel's involvement doesn't seem too sinister to me.

I think it was MITs involvement the above poster was concerned about... but the fact that it is open source is indeed relevant!

Stavros from TileDB, Inc. here: This comment gives us the opportunity to explain a bit the history of the company and our thesis. TileDB was my research project while I was working as a full-time researcher at Intel Labs and was stationed at MIT. This was part of a collaboration between Intel Labs and MIT, called Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) for Big Data. Intel funded MIT (and several other universities) for 5 years, while mandating that any tech produced in the center should be open-source with a non-restrictive license (like our MIT license), and without any strings attached. So ISTC was for pure research. We created TileDB, Inc. so that we can continue working on TileDB beyond the graceful termination of the ISTC, since we believed that the tech (and future vision) can significantly contribute to the scientific community (there was already some early evidence through our work with the Broad Institute on genomics). The company will continue to respect and contribute to the open-source community, while trying to bring together very talented people to transition the tech from a research project to a production-ready software.

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