That’s really sad to hear.
I hope that MDG still has a long runway left, and that they will make it with Galaxy and Apollo!
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I’m not as worried about the future of Rethink as others seem to be (given that Stripe swooped in as opposed to Google). In fact, it may be the case that Rethink will become better than ever now that its “corporate team” is moving on. Obviously, the team behind Rethink is really talented and have done great work. However, a project like this could benefit substantially by going fully open source. When a project is backed solely by a startup its future is always in question. Alternatively, when an OSS community picks up a project it tends to have longevity (which is what a lot of people using Rethink were looking for).
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Just note that the blog posting mentions that the engineering team is moving to Stripe, not that the project is.
over the next few months, I’ll write about lessons learned so the startup community can benefit from our mistakes
…
With the company shutting down, we also wanted to find a new home for our team … We’re excited that the members of our engineering team will be joining Stripe
Really can’t wait to read their lessons learned … especially the part that talks about how they received $12.2 million in 4 rounds of funding, and in the end (how it sounds like) all they had to sell to another company was their team. I think a few “business 101” principles might have been missed somewhere … 
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Indeed. I mentioned Stripe and Google because if Google had come in they would have sent Rethink to the guillotine given its position as an alternative to Firebase.
Personally, in addition to comment above that there was no real problem to solve, I feel their ReQL language (despite its supposed ‘greatnance’) was a hindrance to adoption (we have sql, mongo-like why the heck come up with something new for people to learn!).
As well, it would have been easier to simply start with the code of Mongo and build live cursors. Then of course, Mongo would replicate this and kill their business.
In short, no real viable opportunity in a mature market. Just the fact that they went to horizon.io instead of simply creating packages for meteor is a sign of business immaturity.
I hope you’re right. They said to expect new, more permissive licensing (probably AGPLv2) and foundation management. There’s also a beta Rethink Enterprise edition that we’ll get a peek at.
I’ve been using it for the past several months and really love it. I adapted it onto the Meteor/SQL/Apollo hello world tutorial and was looking forward to pushing forward. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea any longer.
I have no experience in database sharding / replication etc, but Rethink really touted their scalability. I can’t speak to the veracity, but that may also be an advantage to Mongo and others.
Horizon was their shot at Galaxy (Horizon Cloud). I agree with you, though, the natural marriage is Rethink + Meteor. And the development teams often spoke well of each other. I’m surprised it never happened.
ReQL is an acquired taste. Coming from SQL to NoSQL, I found ReQL easier than Mongo.
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Really can’t wait to read their lessons learned … especially the part that talks about how they received $12.2 million in 4 rounds of funding, and in the end (how it sounds like) all they had to sell to another company was their team. I think a few “business 101” principles might have been missed somewhere …
I’m a business owner (car dealership), and I’ve listened to Slava’s podcasts and blogs on business. He’s extremely smart and capable.
His view is databases in 2016 cannot charge because there are too many viable free solutions. Oracle and Microsoft sell to legacy customers, but a new closed source database in 2016 is dead on arrival. He sold investors on the Mongo support model.
But I think the underpinnings of the “build it and they will ask for support” model is flawed for venture capital. Yes, it’s worked for Mongo and a few select others. MDG seems to have monetized Galaxy with some success and they’re looking to monetize Apollo with support and tools. However, the Rethink story should give every Meteor / Apollo loving developer pause.
I believe this model can work for self funded ventures. But when venture capital is involved, I don’t see how the 10x multiple type returns happen. (With open source IP, how can Rethink return $140M??)
And I believe Rethink was a victim of their own success. If you make a solid product without bugs and great documentation, there aren’t too many needing support.
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Don’t worry - there’s a reason why MDG hasn’t open-sourced the atmosphere.com web app … that IP is their golden ticket! 
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I’ve thought a few times about starting a thread to ask about MDG’s runway. I always hesitated for fear of inviting trolls or coming off as rude / hitting too close to home.
But for those who have invested real time and effort in Meteor this story is a wake up call. The “free salad and breadsticks” model means you eventually need to move some serious wine to keep the lights on. Does anyone have any insight into MDG’s current burn rate? I see the last round was May 2015 . . . and the environment for raising was quite a bit more friendly then. Does anyone have a sense of when MDG needs to go back into the market?
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I don’t know if this is the right thread to talk about it, but one very important aspect of MDG is that all of our monetization is through products like Galaxy and Optics rather than support, which lets us scale up revenue without needing to expand the team significantly.
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I completely know what you mean by creating troll bait. However, this might be the best time to do it. This shut down left a lot of us pretty sober and reality hits hard.
These companies implore us to use their products to make our living and pay our own bills. It’s fair game to inquire about their financial health. (It’s also fair if they don’t want to answer – then we all have decisions)
@sashko is a tremendous MDG advocate and developer. I feel that he does a great job of being loyal while also being honest. Not easy, but very appreciated.
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If you feel like Meteor is a product of MDG that can’t live independently, there’s no better way to fix than than to contribute and worth together with us to make the platform great! @thea is putting in tons of effort in this direction here: Community Involvement Setup
Regardless of financials, the project will be much better off long term if a diverse set of people and organizations contribute to it.
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Sad news. Just as I started a new project with RethinkDB and Apollo…
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This is a joke i guess.
You can still use Apollo with RethinkDB. It’s not going anywhere, just the parent company is shutting down.
I’d be surprised if Rethink doesn’t get a good level of support once all this has happened. A lot of people really loved it (myself included) and the product is very good. It solves a lot of complicated and resource-heavy issues (mostly real-time feeds, notifications and scalability).
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In open source, it’s usually a few that work for the benefit of the community. So finding many (DB’s are not easy to develop or maintain) in that haystack who have the right mix to keep development, when so many DB’s are around, won’t be easy.
In fact, RethinkDB precisely flourished as it was free. Look how hard it is to find contributors to Meteor, everyone wants a free ride.
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Having written a completely “different” (not OAuth) Meteor accounts package ( https://github.com/FGM/accounts-drupal ) I found that Meteor introduced interesting aspects in the base accounts system (like rate limitation, resume tokens…), but was also lacking, especially wrt the user “profile” fields and an incomplete/inconsistent hook mechanism (eg https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/7213 )
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I hope you’re right… but it is a C++ codebase. The vast majority of the people who use it can’t (easily) help.[quote=“sashko, post:33, topic:30043”]
If you feel like Meteor is a product of MDG that can’t live independently, there’s no better way to fix than than to contribute and worth together with us to make the platform great!
[/quote]
I wasn’t passing any judgement on the viability of Meteor without MDG. I wish I had the technical skill to jump into the code base and write a PR for adding Postgres to Meteor Accounts… but I don’t know how to do a PR, I’ve never run a test, etc. Basically, my only value is from the peanut gallery (aka no value), or intellectual property questions. Then I’m an expert.
Interesting. I didn’t mean to suggest that Meteor accounts was the end all, be all. I’ll read up on that issue. Thanks for the link!
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