[richardwigley]

Is Rethink going to stay in the community? Or is there a chance that it could be bought out? I don't want to spend time learning something and have it go private like FoundationDB. I'm assuming GNU and Apache is a good thing?

How is RethinkDB licensed?

The RethinkDB server is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The client drivers are licensed under the Apache License v2.0. http://rethinkdb.com/faq/

[coffeemug]

Slava, CEO @ Rethink here. There are two aspects that you should consider.

Firstly, as Daniel pointed out, RethinkDB is licensed under AGPL. An acquirer wouldn't have the legal means to close the source code, and with over 700 forks on GitHub they also couldn't do it practically.

But beyond licensing, consider our personal motivations. We've been working on RethinkDB for five years, and had quite a few opportunities to sell the company. We turned them all down because we really believe in the product. The world is clearly moving towards realtime apps, and we feel it's extremely important for open realtime infrastructure to exist. It's easy for people to make promises about the future, but consider this from a game-theoretic point of view. If we wanted to sell, we could have done it long ago. I know it's not a guarantee, but hopefully it's a strong signal to help with your decision.

(Also, there are lots of really interesting companies building products on RethinkDB that we can't talk publicly about yet. It would be silly to sell given that momentum)

[jwr]

I hear you talk a lot about real-time — I guess that's a niche that you noticed. But let me add to that: being "distributed" without major pain is also big. There is a niche to be filled on the (loosely defined) "distributed" spectrum between, say, Redis and Cassandra, and so far you seem to be heading right for that place. I like that a lot and plan to use RethinkDB for a number of projects in the near future.

[exelius]

What about Couchbase? Specifically for the niche on the spectrum between Redis and Cassandra.

[ma2rten]

My understanding is that Couchbase is just a key-value store, while RethinkDB has much more features including complex queries, sorting, joins, indices...

[jchrisa]

Couchbase has indexing, map reduce, and full text. Also a mobile sync connector.

[vogan42]

Couchbase conflict resolution is really basic, assuming you mean distributed in a wan context (eg xdcr). Riak would represent the state of the art in this respect (random internet endorsement, I'm not affiliated with anything, just a user who has worked with both systems).

[EugeneOZ]

Minimal hardware requirements are... huge.

[TkTech]

In the unlikely chance that you can talk about future plans, is the idea to commercialize by offering "enterprise" support on top of Rethink, or an extended-feature closed source version, etc...?

At some point people need bread and butter, so I'm curious where that's going to come from :)

<3 Rethink.

[coffeemug]

Our business plans are all about a subscription support model (see http://rethinkdb.com/services/) and enterprise services on top of RethinkDB. The product will always be open source (hopefully the OSS community at large is past the world of closed source "extensions").

[ifcologne]

FoundationDB was a closed-source database. It was never open-source.

They had only open-sourced the SQL-Layer on top of their key/value store and it's still available on Github. The reason: They build it based on open-source code

When someone deletes a public repository on Github, one fork remains as the new master. (Here's FoundationDB's SQL-Layer: https://github.com/louisrli/sql-layer)

So: RethinkDB will stay, even if someone tries to pull the plug. Just fork them on Github. :)

[danielmewes]

Daniel @ RethinkDB here. As you mention, RethinkDB is fully open source so RethinkDB is always going to remain freely available.

[vezzy-fnord]

This does not discount the possibility of a license change after a hypothetical acquisition, however. Though in that case you'll likely get a community fork branching off the upstream proprietary base.

[Shamanmuni]

No, the AGPL uses strong copyleft, so any future derivative work must be released under the same terms (and the same license or later versions if I'm not mistaken). The only possibility is to start a closed source clone that doesn't use any of the original code from zero.

The cases in which the community forks a project licensed with a copyleft license (like LibreOffice) has to do with insatisfaction with the direction in which the company that owns the original trademarks is leading said project. There's no risk of closing the source code.

[coffeemug]

> No, the AGPL uses strong copyleft, so any future derivative work must be released under the same terms (and the same license or later versions if I'm not mistaken). The only possibility is to start a closed source clone that doesn't use any of the original code from zero.

Slava @ RethinkDB here.

This has one exception -- the copyright owner can choose to start releasing enhancements as closed source, and they wouldn't be legally obligated to open source them. Currently RethinkDB, Inc. owns the rights to the code -- if we wanted to continue developing closed-source enhancements, technically we could. If we were acquired and our acquirer chose to do that, they could too (since they'd end up owning the rights to the code). Copyright and licensing are different things -- essentially the copyright owner has the right to relicense future code in a different way.

We have extremely strong incentives not to engage in bad behavior (and it runs against our beliefs), but I thought I'd point out that there is no legal barrier.

[exelius]

One caveat with this: if your project is open source and has accepted submissions from non-affiliated entities, you would either need to get them to assign the rights to that code to RethinkDB or remove them from the source if you were to relicense under something that would break the AGPL. This is where things like code releases come in.

This is also why many open source startups don't accept code submissions from outsiders until they've determined they're going down the path of a consulting-focused business model. It's just too risky.

[coffeemug]

Yes, we ask all contributors to sign the CLA (http://rethinkdb.com/community/cla/).

[e12e]

Just a note: the comparison with foundation db isn't all that apt -- Sun/Solaris+ZFS/Oracle is probably a more apt comparison to what could hypothetically change if RethinkDB is bought up (by, say, Oracle..).

I'm not suggesting that is likely, but that it's more what would/could happen -- there is already a real, working, full product that wouldn't disappear over night. And a commercial fork would likely be pretty painful for everyone, just as closed Solaris is looking less and less interesting as both many of the minds behind the great parts of Solaris work on Open Solaris in one form or another, and as fewer community resources go into closed Solaris.

I see the AGPL (as opposed to some ad-hoc license) as another benefit for RethinkDB. Many might not like the copyleft-part -- but at least it is a known and well-documented quantity -- no surprises likely to come from/with forking and/or when trying to merge with other Free software (be that BSD or GPL or...).

[eternalban]

Slava, why do you consider that bad behavior?

- You & and your team have put in 5 years of effort. - You have generously shared your mind product. The community has it.

I don't [know] about you, but over here in NYC, we have to pay for food, rent, clothing, medical insurance, entertainment, etc. Not a single one of these transactions involves counter parties that would smile my way and say "it's on the house".

[andrewflnr]

Well, for one thing, at this point it would be a bait-and-switch.

[richardwigley]

Authoritative source of information, thanks ;-) I will evaluate it on my next project.

[Apofis]

Quick question: How would RethinkDB benefit an E-Commerce shop?

[coffeemug]

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Shoot me an email to [e-mail] -- I'd be happy to help!

[benatkin]

I don't consider the AGPL to be fully open source. To me, it isn't in the spirit of open source.

(BTW the Open Source Institute was unable to get a trademark for "open source" so it doesn't matter that they approved it.)

[e12e]

I hesitate to comment (we've had a few copyleft vs BSD etc-discussions...) -- still, I think the best way to look at the AGPL is as the GPL patched to work around the move from software distribution to software as a service: the end user no longer gets a copy of the software, and so the GPL doesn't protect the end user any more (which is who the GPL is for, incidentally the end user might also be a developer -- but that is incidental: the first Freedom (Freedom 0) is the freedom to run code. You don't have that freedom with SaaS -- if the service provider goes away, so does your ability to run the software).

Now, one can be in agreement with the idea that the four freedoms are important, especially as we increasingly live in a world where software is not only convenient, but necessary in our daily lives -- but the idea with the AGPL, and why it is needed for server software -- is pretty clear.

[eternalban]

What does "fully open source" mean?