Basho has experienced some MAJOR brain drain in the last year. I wonder if this re-positioning is related to that.
The primary reason I left Basho is that I felt the company was turning into a "don't invent here" culture, the polar opposite of "not invented here". The goal was no longer to solve hard distributed systems problems and build amazing technology, but to just integrate various "trendy" technologies and make an enterprise simplification play.
The problem is that most of these other technologies have major failings and/or punt on the corner cases that us old time Basho engineers obsessed over.
The whole point of Riak was to be the most highly available, fault tolerant, trusted database you could use. You can't just integrate Riak with arbitrary products X, Y, and Z without compromising on those core tenants.
I really hope Basho can deliver on the promises they're making about this data platform product. I really do. But, for various reasons I can't really talk about, I'd say I'm extremely skeptical.
(BTW, for those that don't know me: I'm a former Principal Engineer at Basho and was the lead developer on a variety of sub-systems in Riak over the last four years)
I'm very happy with CouchBase and I feel like they are way ahead of everyone else in terms of skating to where there puck is going to be. In fact, at the time I was using Riak they were moving very fast engineering wise and building great stuff- and CouchBase was still figuring out what it wanted to be when it grew up (with the merger of Membase and CouchDB/CouchIO). Now the roles are reversed. CouchBase is the one that's moving fast without breaking stuff.
To be honest, I think CouchBase is the secret sauce of what I'm doing. I laugh at all the MongoDB posts on HN especially given so rarely that CouchBase gets mentioned.
I'm not bashing Riak- it's solidly engineered.
I can't speculate on how that all relates to brain drain.
But yeah, @jtuple, @Roach_B_me, and others have some choice tweets on the matter.
Off topic- your name is a fantastic book!
"L-space, short for library-space, is the ultimate portrayal of Pratchett's concept that the written word has powerful magical properties on the Discworld, and that in large quantities all books warp space and time around them. The principle of L-space revolves around a seemingly logical equation; it is an extension of the 'Knowledge is Power':
Books = Knowledge = Power = (Force x Distance^2) ÷ Time"
It's a nice database, but not well understood. I've found it difficult to communicate how everything fits together to people do don't use this stuff everyday, so maybe this will help? At least it makes it clear that a seemingly complex configuration is perfectly valid and workable in practice.