from Hacker News

RethinkDB Relicensed under Apache 2.0

by csmajorfive on 2/6/17, 2:15 PM with 164 comments

  • by mglukhovsky on 2/6/17, 2:41 PM

    Hey everyone, thanks to the rest of the RethinkDB leadership team and the CNCF for their hard work! This wouldn't have been possible without a lot of effort from our dedicated community.

    You can read the announcement on RethinkDB's blog to find out about the project's next steps: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-joins-linux-foundation/

    We've had a lot of folks ask if they can donate to support the project. Stripe has generously offered to match up to $25k in donations (which will help fund server costs and future development.) You can learn how to contribute to the project with OSS contributions or donations here: https://rethinkdb.com/contribute

  • by chrisabrams on 2/6/17, 2:35 PM

    RethinkDB leadership member here: happy to answer any questions for the next hour or so.

    One thing to note, this was not an easy process; our team has spent months working daily on a solution. This was definitely our Plan A result, but we never expected LF to step up and provide the sponsorship funding as well. Huge thanks to LF/CNCF for helping close things in the end!

    If you use RethinkDB please make sure to give a leadership member a hug if you happen to be in SF/NYC/Nashville/Philly/etc.

  • by api on 2/6/17, 2:31 PM

    Feeling good about our decision to stick with it for our core infrastructure's next incarnation. Still very sad that they didn't make it as a company. We would have paid. RethinkDB is an unbelievable technology: better under the hood and IMHO easier to use than MongoDB, and combining NoSQL with some SQL-like features that for us are good enough. The rough edges we've found so far are minor.

    We used PostgreSQL before and while excellent on a single node it's deeply painful to cluster. You need a full time DBA to make sure you're doing it right, as GitLab discovered, and when it fails it gives error messages that seem more cryptic than C++ template errors. Amazon RDS was insanely pricey compared to bare metal (our load is both CPU-bound and disk-IO-heavy bare metal on OVH is >10X cheaper than Amazon) and Redshift didn't have pgsql syntax yet. Even now that it does I'm not sure I want to be bound to it as I have an instinctive aversion to cloud lock-in.

  • by niftich on 2/6/17, 3:19 PM

    The GNU Affero GPLv3 has been a recurring topic during RethinkDB's existence, but I cannot substantiate the same having been an issue for MongoDB. Links appreciated.

    Some instances of people asking about GNU Affero GPLv3 and RethinkDB:

    (2014-11-16) https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/3347

    (2015-06-16) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rethinkdb/g5UEck3sqM...

    (2016-10-10) https://sagemath.blogspot.com/2016/10/rethinkdb-must-relicen...

    (2017-01-09) https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/6221

  • by caniszczyk on 2/6/17, 2:41 PM

    FYI also Stripe has generously agreed to match up to $25,000 in donations: https://rethinkdb.com/contribute

  • by eicnix on 2/6/17, 2:48 PM

    Awesome.

    Although I wanted to use RethinkDB for new stuff I was very hesitant to introduce a probably discontinued product. Using a Linux product with Apache 2 instead makes the decision to introduce RethinkDB much easier.

    Is somebody already working on a operator for kubernetes like coreos did for etcd [1]? What is your recommended kubernetes deployment for RethinkDB?

    [1] https://github.com/coreos/etcd-operator

  • by divbit on 2/6/17, 2:26 PM

    Am I reading this right? Rethinkdb is now under apache 2? That's awesome news - such great software.

  • by tyingq on 2/6/17, 2:31 PM

    Curious what they paid for the IP rights to do it. The earlier discussion posted here indicated the IP holder wanted a fairly large figure to sell it.

  • by kepano on 2/6/17, 5:01 PM

    This is very exciting. We've been using RethinkDB in production at Lumi for the past two years and it's been nothing short of perfect. The prospect of switching has been a nagging dread, but the continued pace of positive announcements is reassuring. We've been contributing back in small ways here and there, but plan to do so more actively now.

  • by josephg on 2/6/17, 7:35 PM

    This is fantastic! I'm working on a little piece of fun realtime streaming database tech, and up until now I thought I'd have to implement my own realtime querying piece. Being able to lean on rethinkdb will make the whole thing way easier to implement, and provide a better experience for my users.

    My concern has been that there's a few missing features in rethinkdb - I want to be able to resume query after a client gets disconnected without re-downloading the result set. (If the data hasn't changed) and I want deeper integration with rethinkdb's versioning system. But I've been too nervous about making those changes myself and build on top of rethinkdb because of license taint. Now this has all been solved. Its starting to look like a good time to crack open the code and submit some patches! Thanks everyone who's made this happen!

  • by overcast on 2/6/17, 2:36 PM

    So awesome, I didn't want to give up using RethinkDB! By far my favorite database.

  • by gkya on 2/6/17, 3:54 PM

    A work on the colours of this page: IDK if it's me only but light-grey font on white background stabs my eyes, I can't even look at it. Why is this a la mode now? Why go lighter than, say, #333 for text that's meant to be read?

  • by z3t4 on 2/6/17, 3:31 PM

    I think GPL did make sense before, but APL make more sense now. I do not fully understand APL though, but it seems, like with MIT, there can be hostile forks, where a competitor takes not only the code, but also the community and the business.

  • by gbrown_ on 2/6/17, 2:29 PM

    It's great to see commercial bodies as well as CNCF not only take interest in these sorts of things but actually push them forward for the benefit of all.

  • by bpicolo on 2/6/17, 2:32 PM

    That's really awesome news, and makes the future of RethinkDB a very exciting prospect!

  • by distantsounds on 2/6/17, 2:45 PM

    RethinkDB is a fantastic piece of software, I'm glad to see this happen.

  • by tracker1 on 2/6/17, 5:36 PM

    OT: Man, that font is way too thin and hard to read... really wish the weight were closer to 500 instead of 300 (injected a style into head to make more readable for me).

    At least they only specified the one font-family and fallback (without helvetica/arial, like a sane person)

  • by the_mitsuhiko on 2/6/17, 2:54 PM

    This is amazing. Thanks so much for everybody who made this possible!

  • by jordigh on 2/6/17, 2:51 PM

    This really bugs me. Copyleft has always been feared by lawyers and corporate people alike. Let's not forget how Ballmer called the GPL a cancer that infects everything it touches. Yet, copyleft is our only defense against abusive proprietary software and without copyleft we might not have the fertile collaboration of projects such as Linux, git, or OpenWrt.

    The AGPL is just an updated GPL. Back when software mostly came in boxes, the GPL was as feared as the AGPL is now. Now that software mostly comes from the internet, the AGPL is there to address this new distribution method. Now the AGPL is the new cancer.

    Overzealous lawyers trying to "protect" copyrights have indoctrinated an entire generation of hackers that sharing code is a danger and the AGPL is the prime threat. I have spoken to too many Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, or Google employees that are convinced that sharing their source code would be tantamount to death. The result is a world where their secret software controls the news we read, the ads we see, the people we talk to, and even the emotions we feel.

    "Open source, but licensed under the AGPL.", says the article. There is no "but" here. The AGPL is the very definition of "open source", because it defends openness. If you have nothing to fear from open source, you have nothing to fear from the AGPL.

  • by netcraft on 2/6/17, 2:36 PM

    Great news! Excited to see what the community can do with it!

  • by abraae on 2/6/17, 2:33 PM

    Sometimes the beauty of the free market is a joy to behold.

  • by gigatexal on 2/6/17, 6:57 PM

    Glad to see this occur, would hate to have production code running without the DB being supported. Kudos to everyone involved. Another win for OSS.

  • by makkesk8 on 2/6/17, 6:24 PM

    This is great, I see a bright future for rethinkdb!

    I've used rethinkdb quite a bit and I was wondering if anything thinks its suitable for time series data?

  • by porker on 2/6/17, 5:06 PM

    How much did the CNCF have to pay for the code?

  • by fcanesin on 2/6/17, 5:41 PM

    Was horizon included in the deal ?