[rockeetterark]

In our situation, making it fully open source for wide adoption would oblige us to become a consulting company with revenue based on support. This would require a large headcount that we cannot support as a mostly bootstrapped startup. So, for now, we decided to focus on the tech and deliver the best tech possible to the (largest) clients who need it the most. Think of it as Quality vs/ Quantity. For instance, as reported in the article, our largest client at the moment is Alibaba Cloud (the Chinese Amazon AWS). We're able to cater to their custom needs and even send our CTO and some engineers to their office to accompany them when needed. We solve a pain point for them on a huge scale, and we're able to make a decent revenue that makes us profitable and allows us to grow our business independently.

But we're open on the question. Our storage engine is also compatible with MongoDB and MySQL, so if we could partner with a large company providing support for MongoDB/MySQL on Terark (think something like Percona, for instance), and that open sourcing all our code was a must, we would consider it.

[ableton]

You guys could keep it proprietary then try to get bought out by one of the big guys who would open source it.