RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Posted Feb 6, 2017 17:34 UTC (Mon) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
Parent article: RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Does this mean that ASF has gotten more discerning about accepting abandonware?

Why does a pub-sub filtering model for new json documents require an entirely new storage backend?

RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Posted Feb 7, 2017 1:28 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

RethinkDB is by all accounts a pretty impressive piece of tech. It's one of the few "distributed databases" to actually live up to the name in Aphyr's tests: https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5

Compare to MongoDB, RethinkDB's most direct competitor: https://aphyr.com/tags/MongoDB

Their post-mortem is also worthwhile reading: http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed...

The CNCF (i.e., these folks: https://www.cncf.io/about/members) paying off the defunct company's creditors to relicense the code is a pretty extraordinary step. (The only precedent I can think of is the crowdfunding campaign that freed Blender?) This should give some idea about the value that at least some people perceive in it.

RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Posted Feb 8, 2017 16:46 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link]

Thanks for those links - looking at the list of CNCF companies who paid to free the code, its even less surprising that the code was relicensed to make it more friendly to Web Service providers.

RethinkDB source relicensed, donated to the Linux Foundation

Posted Feb 7, 2017 10:19 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Does this mean that ASF has gotten more discerning about accepting abandonware?

Has the ASF even been involved? Do they even know anything about it?

Using the Apache licence has nothing whatever to do with the Apache Software Foundation. It would have been nicer if they'd chosen the Mozilla licence (which allows closed add-ons to an open source base, but forbids closing the original open source). But it's their code, their choice.

And anyway, the whole point of the story is it's not abandonware. A group of Open Source people "bought" a defunct codebase because they actually wanted it. That's not abandonware in my book :-)

Cheers,
Wol