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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Yes, I know there are exceptions.

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?

Link: http://www.couchbase.com/nosql-databases/couchbase-mobile

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.

https://discuss.horizon.io/t/are-rethink-and-horizon-dead-ab...

That doesn't sound promising :/

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).

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.

Or is mongo no longer crap for consistency?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/understanding-secdb-goldman-sach...

It looks like the RethinkDB project will be alive if it will be maintained by the community or if it could find another sponsor. But if you are looking for an alternative take a look at OrientDB Live Query feature: http://orientdb.com/livequery/. It doesn't cover 100% what RethinkDB provides, but it's something very close. The OrientDB's license is Apache 2 (so FREE for any usage) and a commercial 24x7 support is available on request.