
Are RethinkDB and Horizon abandoned? - jamon51
https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-abandoned/619
======
coffeemug
Slava @ RethinkDB here. I am not able to get into details yet, but the short
version is that the commercial entity behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We're
working on continuity for the open-source project. Full announcement (and
details) coming in a day or two.

~~~
williamstein
Slava: As the commercial strategy is over, please release everything under a
very liberal open source license rather than AGPL (the current RethinkDB
license). Please. I have invested so much in building on RethinkDB, and you
can't just will a genuine open source community into existence without giving
them the power that comes with a liberal license. Honestly, right now I'm
evaluating how I can rewrite everything I've built to not use RethinkDB, which
will take me months of fulltime work...

~~~
bryanlarsen
I really, really, hope that's why they've gone quiet, that they're minimising
disruptions while they're re-licensing to a more liberal license while
transferring ownership to a foundation.

------
eis
This thread seems actively being burried by HN. Now it's flagged as dupe and
the previous thread from yesterday also quickly disappeared from the front
page after gaining traction.

Why are threads that get tons of upvotes and have active commenting going on
getting kicked off the frontpage? YCombinator invested in RethinkDB and HN is
a YCombinator platform so they have an interest in suppressing speculation or
bad news but I think manipulation here goes a bit too far.

HN mods: what happened here?

~~~
nathancahill
The previous discussion was buried too. I'd also like to know why a link with
+250 points is modded away. Obviously they are trying to keep it on the dl,
but we really need some transparency when HN the news site conflicts with YC
the fund.

Edit: Here's a semi-buried sctb response:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12631225)

------
benjaminwootton
And people wonder why enterprises are risk averse and nervous of open source
and new innovations from startups.

Are there any circumstances where a company can reasonably go dark for a week?

If it is an acquisition it's pretty disrepectful of people investing in their
solution.

~~~
wingless
On the contrary, I would say that enterprises should take the risk and use
such projects. They likely have enough capital to hire the correct people
(e.g. one of the core devs) when a problem shows up.

Startups can't afford that. Therefore they should use older technology until
they grow big enough to tank the damage.

~~~
bnastic
That's not how enterprises work.

~~~
moreentropy
Ack. Sadly, enterprise procurement is all about avoiding blame in case
something goes wrong. Another issue is contributing to open source projects. I
know a case where a customer's in house developer had to wait two months to
contribute a few lines patch to a open source project because legal objected.
They never dealt with that situation before.

~~~
nikanj
Enterprise procurement is all about avoiding things going wrong, avoiding
blame is a distant second. When every hour of downtime costs hundreds of
thousands, the ridiculously expensive, 24/7 SLA supported enterprise solutions
don't seem so overpriced anymore.

------
tleyden5iwx
It looks like RethinkDB is relying solely on revenue from training and
support. Is that even feasible for a product like theirs?

I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was
extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean
architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops
folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of
the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database
with-scaling-issues} cluster.

But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely
from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has:

* Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training)

* Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support)

Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of
this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection.

I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep
RethinkDB alive?

Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not
working for them?

~~~
williamstein
They were trying to pivot to at least two additional revenue models during he
last year, but it seems to have simply took too long (1. Custom closed code
for enterprise customers, 2. Hosted Horizon). I have paid RethinkDB for
support by the way, just to support them.

------
jondubois
I think now is not a good time for open source. There is just too much
advertising in the tech industry.

The advantage of open source used to be that it could help you to grow the
user base of a product very quickly for free through only word of mouth. Open
source is a low-margin, high volume industry.

These days, tech industry advertising is so strong/competitive that
traditional 'word-of-mouth' marketing has become ineffective. I think open
source products have a hard time reaching the kinds of volumes that they need
to become profitable.

On the other hand, show me any open source project and I can quickly find a
proprietary alternative which is not as good, costs a fortune but which
thrives in this economy because they have received a ton of funding and are
just spamming the internet with their ads.

------
barrkel
Why has this been marked dupe? What is it a dupe of - I don't see any other
story on the front page about this?

~~~
Artemis2
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682)

------
gotofritz
There was another discussion on this, but it's dead for some reason...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682)

TL;DR a lot of people think there's a secrete acquisition going on and they
are doing code evaluation

------
Ros2
RethinkDB kicked (at least) 2 people from their Github organization involved
in Horizon development. This tells me they plan to continue the organization
in some way--probably under another company and not with Horizon at all.

Considering who these 2 people were and their contributions, it wouldn't make
any sense for them to hurriedly remove them. (One was also a RethinkDB
developer). That is, if the "continuity plan" were just gifting it to the
community.

It's all speculation but I think it paints a clear picture. I have been doing
a pulse check on RethinkDB / Horizon for a while so I've been watching this
pretty closely.

~~~
buskila
So what are you saying?

------
lukeholder
Oh no! Hope everything ends up OK. RethinkDB is so fun to use. Would it be
normal for development to slow when an acquisition is happening?

~~~
mpk
Yes, that would be normal. During an acquisition the future is unknown so you
don't have a reliable roadmap you can use to set or update development goals.
Other activities that take away from development could be developers working
on capability demonstration or participating in technical due diligence.

(I don't know anything about the rethinkdb situation, I'm just speaking
generally here)

------
bbulkow
Founder of a (non YC) database company here.

Founding companies are hard, databases are really hard, and we're in the
middle of a shakeout in the database industry. At Aerospike, we really, really
focused on paying customers early. We gathered a huge number of the "big boys"
in advertising ( who need ridiculous speed & uptime in a key-value system )
and have leveraged that into lots of enterprise use cases ( telecom, payment
fraud, transaction processing ), which has kept us of interest to the
investment community and allows us to fund all that we do.

The database problem is a _big problem_ requiring a lot of investment. I heard
that very explictly from some VCs when I was first raising ( you're a fool if
you think you need a $5 seed round, and we don't fund fools, essentially :-)
), and the drip-by-drip VC cycle then requires extraordinarily disciplined
product / feature analysis. I get a lot of requests for more types of indexes,
more types of notification, and we need to pick and choose the priority
carefully. We want to - and hopefully will - get a chance to build everything
eventually, but also need to answer the question "why should I use this
instead of a familiar tech like Mongo or MySQL or Postgres", and "follow the
leader" product planning is a classic fail.

Open source of course has to be part of the equation. Aerospike went open
source late, about 2014, and I still wonder what would have happened if we
open sourced earlier. Our core big customers need a supported product, but
we've lagged, and I know Rethink's better DBEngines ranking comes from both
more features and earlier open source. Open source is also driving prices down
across the board - a $250M / year oracle deal, converted to EnterpriseDB or
MariaDB, turns into a $2.5M deal. Further - for instructure, open source is
the only escrow you can trust. The business model question is complex, and
creates mistakes if you think the opportunity size is 100x the true size.

Anyway - I'm sad to hear of this change at Rethink, I remember when they were
on Dana St and we were on Castro around the corner, both focused on and coding
for Flash and building the best databases in the world. My best wishes to the
team, and anyone who is interested can reach out to me directly.

------
stemuk
This discussion has no duplicate, so why is it marked as dupe??

------
craigyk
Pick two:

1\. Valuable product maintained by professionals 2\. Is free 3\. Will be
around for a long time

Yes, I know there are exceptions.

~~~
EugeneOZ
Huh. Apache, nginx, php, js, python, Linux, chromium, asterisk, openvpn...
list is very very long. Actually I doubt there is more proprietary software
that is widely accepted and reliable, than open-source (or even free) software
with same achievements.

~~~
regularfry
"Valuable product maintained by professionals" doesn't equal "proprietary".
_All_ those products you list have people paid to work on them.

Open Source doesn't work in the long term without sponsorship of some sort.

~~~
EugeneOZ
You want to say these products are not valuable or not maintaned by
professionals? They are making money around their projects same as RethinkDB
did, so I don't understand what difference you want to underline.

------
jondubois
I hope that RethinkDB (the company) gets acquired. I think the main hurdle for
them is that their product is open source.

Unfortunately a lot of large old-school software companies believe that there
is no IP (no sense of ownership) when it comes to open source - This is not
true however. Open source companies still 'own' the code repos, the
documentation website, the team, the chat boards, the domain names, the
package manager registries, Docker registries, etc... What is more valuable;
the source code or everything else?

------
ddorian43
Well, at least it's open source, right guys ?

~~~
williamstein
Yes and the source (that I've looked at) is high quality. That said, it's a
very complicated program with no room for mistakes, and it is written in C++
so plenty of opportunities for memory/pointer issues. RethinkDB is very stable
these days, unlike a year ago, and I think it could work well as a full open
source project at this point (given the good code quality and docs).
Absolutely critical to that would be relicensing everything under a much more
liberal license than AGPL!!

------
saintfiends
Shit! We just started using RethinkDB. This is pretty scary.

~~~
BafS
We made the choice to use RethinkDB with my team exactly 1 hour ago, crazy.

~~~
kaiyes
cmon. thats just.....I don't know what to say

------
PaulCapestany
Don't want to be accused of being a shill (I'm not, I'm just a fan), but if
you're looking for potential alternatives to RethinkDB, Couchbase (the company
that was formed when the MemcacheD and CouchDB folks joined forces) offer a
totally open source realtime-sync API/SDK (cross-platform: mobile, web, you
name it).

Link: [http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-
mobile](http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile)

~~~
tepidandroid
The deal-breaker for me with couchbase is that the community edition lags (in
terms of bug fixes, security updates, etc) 8-10 months behind their
commercially licensed offering.

~~~
arun_couch
Arun from Couchbase, few points ...

1 - Unabashedly, our #1 commitment is to our customers who are relying on
Couchbase for their mission critical applications. That's why the Couchbase
Enterprise Edition gets the bulk of our attention and testing.

2 - History can show that's it's actually more like 3-6 months of delay rather
that 8-10 and corresponds more to our release cycles than to an artificially
imposed delay.

3 - Couchbase major releases has always had CE and EE in sync.

4 - Couchbase CE is provided as a service to the community. Users who want to
rely upon their own expertise to run a database in production have a
responsibility to themselves and their organization to have the appropriate
level of skills to do so. That should mean being able to debug and fix bugs
themselves. In fact, our open source code base does not lag AT ALL and anyone
is welcome to build off of that themselves and get all of the latest and
greatest features (and bugs of course). If they're not willing to do this,
they should be paying us to.

~~~
frankleng
3 is not quite true. tried deploying CE at scale at my last company, ran into
a gnarly limit on concurrent connections the db cluster would handle. It was a
hard coded, undocumented limit on the CE version.

not sure if this still exists. but it took some digging into the source, and
monkey patching to fix.

~~~
HodGreeley
Hod @ Couchbase here. EE would have had the same limits. If this is the limit
I'm thinking of, it's there for a reason (defensive against malfunctioning
implementations, and very rarely something that should be exceeded). It was
increased at some point (not sure when). But CE is not crippled relative to
EE.

------
jakebasile
I had just been evaluating Horizon for a new project using React. It looked
very promising but we decided to use Firebase instead, in spite of Firebase
being closed source and subject to vendor lock in. We simply couldn't justify
forgoing the built in deployment and additional features of Firebase when we
are on such a tight time and money budget.

I hope there is a good outcome for Horizon and RethinkDB, they both seemed
excellent technologies and it'd be sad to see them languish.

------
mrsteveman1
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630682)

------
pas
"Slava @ Rethink here. Unfortunately I cannot comment yet (I really wish I
could), but your intuition is right. We're working hard to be able to give a
full account ASAP (matter of days). Please stay tuned."

[https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-
ab...](https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-
abandoned/619/7)

That doesn't sound promising :/

------
hoodoof
This is the sort of thing that needs to live in a bigger company that wants a
quality database product to round out its product offering.

------
thejosh
Really why popular opensource from companies controlled by that company is a
bad idea if noone is really interested in carrying it forward.

How many frameworks/languages/tools would survive if their parent company
disappeared?

I know IO.js was successful when diverging from nodejs (even if they ended up
merging again).

------
diegorbaquero
I'd be pretty sad if they abandon it. I have used and use it in many projects.

------
frankleng
perhaps [https://www.pipelinedb.com/](https://www.pipelinedb.com/) can be an
alternative as well.

It's not that we are super set on using RethinkDB, but love ReQL! Going back
to SQL just seems a huge step back at this point.

------
tshannon
So what alternatives are there to Rethink? Not excited about Mongo.

Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?

------
shobhitverma
RethinkDB was closest thing I knew to SecDB. I used to love SecDB when I was
using it.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-
sach...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sachss-most-
valued-trading-weapon-1473242401)

------
nutanc
IBM's compose supports rethinkDB. Will they continue to support?

