[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).

[jchrisa]

Our XDCR doesn't have quite the power of our mobile sync conflict management, but I'd wager to say what we do for mobile is unbeatable as far as delivering unsurprising behavior for offline / p2p applications.

[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").