RethinkDB: very much alive. Now under the wing of the Linux Foundation

For the past few months, the situation around RethinkDB has been very vague, it was difficult to say something about the future of the project. But the situation was finally resolved , a long-awaited update appeared in the official blog explaining the current state of affairs. As it became known, CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) bought the rights to the source code of RethinkDB and transferred the project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Before transferring the code was transferred from the license AGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. The transfer was carried out in the framework of the initiative taken by the former RethinkDB developers to transfer the project management to the community.

When the company developing the RethinkDB DBMS announced closure , the group of former employees, with the support of other community members, formed a team whose goal was to completely transfer the project to the community with the license change. From the announcement of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we see that the situation has finally resolved - CNCF bought the rights to the RethinkDB sorts and transferred the project to The Linux Foundation under the ASLv2 license.

RethinkDB live and live! Development of the DBMS will continue without interruption. You can continue to use Rethink in production, updates will keep coming out. With the support of the Linux Foundation, the project will continue to evolve.

In recent months, the community has shown its interest in supporting the project with a coin. Now you can donate to support the project. Stripe also agreed to support the project by pushing $ 25,000.

A little about RethinkDB

RethinkDB is an open source NoSQL database ( sors on a github ) that has a built-in change notification system . Instead of requests to the database for changes, you can “subscribe” to streaming updates, which will eliminate unnecessary requests to the database.

RethinkDB is a schematic storage of JSON documents, but also supports some features of relational databases. RethinkDB also supports clustering, which makes it very easy to expand. You can configure sharding and copying via the built-in web interface. The latest version of RethinkDB also includes automatic fail-over for clusters with three or more servers. (Approx. translator: implies the possibility of continuing to work with the database in the event of a server crash.)
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The query language in RethinkDB, which is called ReQL, is natively embedded in the code in the language in which you write your application. If, for example, you code in Python, then when writing queries to the database you will use the usual Python syntax. Each request is made up of functions that the developer assembles in a chain in order to accurately describe the necessary operation.

And now what?

The team will continue to continue to open the software, content, a bunch of art (by the wonderful @annieruygt ) and documentation that have been developed by the team in the last 7 years. There is also a conversation with CNCF about the possibility of becoming an Inception project.

The new release of RethinkDB is already in the works: for the past few months, volunteers have contributed a lot to the project. In the coming days, we can expect the release of RethinkDB 2.4. The new version includes various improvements from the community, as well as features developed by the team of former Resinkovtsev. It will also be released RethinkDB 2.3.6 with fix important bugs.

Why so long?

After the closure of the company, the project was mothballed. Just fork it and continue development under a different name was impossible because of the AGPL license. CNCF resolved the conflict by buying all the sources.

Join the RethinkDB community

If you want to participate in the community, there are many ways to do this:

• Read about how to contribute to RethinkDB.
• Join the # open-rethinkdb channel on the RethinkDB channel in Slack .
• Roll pullrequest and create tickets on GitHub .
• Follow @rethinkdb on Twitter.

To keep abreast of events, read the notes from the last meeting in January .

Interesting links on the topic:

1. interesting post from Bryan Cantrill (CTO Joyent). A little reflection on why AGPL is bad.
2. Over RethinkDB clouds are gathering?
3. Postportem by Slava Akhmechet

PS I know that in the ru segment, few people use this database. But for those who, nevertheless, waited and hoped, the news will be pleasant.