Lance is a great guy and that lab for a decade plus has done great work and supported so much of community. Happily supported their start and will continue to.
Exactly. I don't understand the drama on this at all.
"Corporate Open Source is dead"?? I don't even know what that means! Having launched at least 20 open source companies, several that went public -- this is not news that this faction of companies were NEVER going to make it (AND WE SAID SO). And that is ok.
I think the path in technology for open technology-based startups no longer looks like it used to for a lot of reasons - financial, maturity of online users, and more. We have really crossed a point where building a startup from scratch - without a strategic VC, ability to share customers with an established player in the market or ability to build on top of another company's technology/platform - is just not possible. The fabled guys in a garage inventing the next thing is gone.
Transparency is a tricky thing. Much information came from tribal knowledge. As rules have changed for private companies in the US, we saw some of the information being provided "as open" became the norm or required so there is less of a need to share it and there is not that "goodwill" factor. Most of what was being shared was available to some extent if you knew/know where to look.
Launched these guys and many other OSS cos and I never thought of them as a true DB. Rethink was evangelizing an approach and how DBs of the future should operate. Ultimately no one knew if they were an DB or a load balancing engine of some kind that sped up DB transactions for say mobile apps that would only send DB changes to the client vs entire DB data. They got stuck in this no-mans land of no one knew what they were - let alone they had no way to sell it.
Open source or not didn't even come into play, They had great interest, devs liked them and they figured out how to do meetups without much budget. Devs I knew said they liked them team but shortly into it it was clear they were hoping a revenue stream would stick and went forward on that would just happen. Strange one really.
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