
Open-RethinkDB meeting notes #4 - deepanchor
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cTqKt1_EBanGoVmYyahdLyDD8dhCa0SdD0CbjbP67f8
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williamstein
News: "Our initial plan was to acquire the intellectual property left over
from the RethinkDB company, enabling us to relicense the code and use the name
RethinkDB. After aggressively pursuing this plan since the company shut down
in September, little progress has been made." Dang.

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jhugg
I wonder what the offer amount is/was.

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tinco
I don't think an offer amount was made. As far as I can tell there is no
significant money or even organization in the group of people that are doing
their best to manage the project. They're still looking for a way to
formalize. I would read this as that stakeholders have not been eager to
donate the RethinkDB IP to a foundation, so perhaps there either are
commercial parties interested in the IP, or the stakeholders think there might
be.

This is all conjecture though, unfortunately besides these meeting notes there
is no record of interactions with the RethinkDB stakeholders.

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jhugg
So you've got this thing that's of non-zero value. Because the company shut
down, and didn't get acquired, it's probably still owned by a largish number
of folks. Getting the right approval to sell it for a song would seem tricky
without majority shareholders being really into the idea.

~~~
jkarneges
Yeah, it's hard. I worked on a video game that was canceled 16 years ago, and
only recently released in unfinished form. It was very difficult to get
consensus among the team to allow a release, and ultimately we had to settle
on a non-free license (CC non-commercial. better than nothing).

We had some commercial offers, but they were low enough that it made it seem
like we could seek a better offer, even though no such better offers really
exist. I can easily see the same thing happening with RethinkDB:

Buyer: I'll give $10K for all of RethinkDB's IP.

Owners: LOL, no thanks. You know how much we spent building this?

Buyer: I'll give you $100K.

Owners: Ehh starting to turn into real money, maybe we'll hold out for a
bigger number?

Buyer: I'll give you $1M!

Owners: Now we're talking! But, no. Surely if you'll offer this much, there's
someone to beat it. Let's go looking.

I don't see a way out...

Fortunately, they picked a FOSS license. As much as people like to gripe on
the AGPL, we have code we can freely modify and use, even commercially. That's
pretty awesome, and more than I can say about my much less valuable video
game.

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overcast
This project is just too awesome to let die, I hope it continues development
for years to come.

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grizzles
The investors should get an automatic tax benefit for releasing the IP into
the public domain. There are great companies that you've never heard of that
die every day and nothing ever happens to their IP. It's a massive economic
waste.

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qeternity
They already get a tax benefit when they write the investment off...

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grizzles
That doesn't release the IP into the public domain. The issue is that it's in
a zombie state that creates liability / uncertainty for anyone that wants to
use it.

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nodesocket
Great to see RethinkDB as a project is pushing forward. My concern is about
product and code quality with the core founders and engineers leaving for
Stripe. I'm sure the open source contributors are great, but do we really
think they will do as fantastic of a job as coffeemug, mglukhovsky, and
danielmewes? Especially now, since the financial motivations are essentially
removed.

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chrisabrams
I can confidently say that there is much more than $$ driving the individuals
that made this wonderful product. (I did not work at RethinkDB).

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jwr
Very happy to see progress being made. There is nothing comparable to
RethinkDB changefeeds out there.

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yeasayer
Oh wow, 2.4 is out next week? I thought we're stuck with 2.3 for a long time.
Top 1 daily Hacker News submission incoming.

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tehchromic
Awrsome!

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rocky1138
I'm worried about this being posted on Google Docs. What happens when Google
Docs gets shut down or migrated into some sort of other service and this
document is not migrated? This sort of thing should be on a mailing list,
methinks.

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kondro
You mean because you think that a service with 3 million paying organizations
and the core part of Google's strategy to get greater adoption in enterprise
and schools is going to disappear?

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rocky1138
It's possible, but what I'm actually thinking about is more along the lines of
lock-in. For instance, Writely, which was the service Google bought to make it
into Google Docs, had a migration period where, before you opened a document
in Google Docs, you had to convert it to the new format. It's a form of bit
rot. Over time, stuff on proprietary services become less and less useful.

I tried archiving this Open-RethinkDB meeting notes document using archive.is
(a very common archiving service) and you can see the output is broken so you
can't archive it:
[https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%...](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fdocument%2Fd%2F1cTqKt1_EBanGoVmYyahdLyDD8dhCa0SdD0CbjbP67f8%2Fedit)

Ask: How will we read this in 10 years?

