I think several aspects of it have disturbed the HN community and elsewhere--
(1) The founders are extremely nice and thoughtful people, as well as everyone I've ever met from there (seriously, top notch). Seeing someone like Uber with their poor ethical reputation succeed and a company like Rethink close down is disheartening.
(2) It's more ammo for the "open source can never make money" crowd which I think is frustrating for HNers like myself who enjoy the idea of running or working for such a business.
(3) Rethink did things the right way engineering and UX wise and had a great reputation for this compared to, say, MongoDB. So as another commenter noted, "worse is better" is still holding true in 2016.
Excellent post, that sums it up my concerns quite nicely.
To expand on 3, and what others have said, RethinkDB is solid technology, and is a joy to maintain, and even scale, compared with MongoDB. To those of us that have used it and depend on it, losing it would feel like a step backwards. It really does feel like the good guys have lost, in that respect.
The story isn't over yet, and hopefully it lives on as a popular and well-maintained open source project.
(1) The founders are extremely nice and thoughtful people, as well as everyone I've ever met from there (seriously, top notch). Seeing someone like Uber with their poor ethical reputation succeed and a company like Rethink close down is disheartening.
(2) It's more ammo for the "open source can never make money" crowd which I think is frustrating for HNers like myself who enjoy the idea of running or working for such a business.
(3) Rethink did things the right way engineering and UX wise and had a great reputation for this compared to, say, MongoDB. So as another commenter noted, "worse is better" is still holding true in 2016.