I stayed away from Rethink in the past few years due to its uncertain future. Now I'm seriously interested. Looking forward to the next chapter of RethinkDB.
I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this. Then again, maybe the board would have balked at that as a sign of no confidence.
You generally have to move carefully to get proprietary software to an open source model. One typical customer reaction to rumors you are open sourcing is "Great! We'll wait until you do that to try it out." The result is that [already not good] sales may tank completely.
RethinkDB wasn't proprietary. It was open source, licensed under the AGPL v2, the same license used by MongoDB, which is doing just fine. MongoDB is one of the top five in the DB-Engines rankings.
One of the key business differences between RethinkDB and MongoDB is that the latter keeps some enterprise-grade features/tools closed-source and available under a commercial license, i.e. the "open core" business model.
I don't know if "we'll relicense if we go out of business" is a particularly helpful stance to a potential customer that wants to use the product in the present. Presumably, if a deal is being closed, then the buyer has agreed to some licensing that is already reasonable enough (e.g. freely modifiable and distributable within the org).
This kind of stance can be useful to a community, though, that wants to ensure future proprietary development remains possible (kind of strange to want but it can make sense). I recall when Trolltech did this with Qt. If they went out of business or there were a change of control, Qt would switch from GPL to BSD licensed.
If the board balked, that would be a sign of not-smart investors. My investors don't have a problem with our MIT/Zlib/Apache2 Open Source database - however, then again, Tim Draper (our lead) was the original investor in Skype way back in the day, so he is way ahead the curve than most (dare I say on HN, even YC).
That is why it is really important to have only the best and smartest VCs on board. Edit: Don't give equity up in your company unless your vision aligns with your investors and they can do more than just fund you.
>I wonder if they could have closed more deals if they'd promised to do something like this.
I think continuation of development and community growth even after they closed down is what gives people confidence - and there's no practical way to show that upfront (assuming that having a big/visible community outside of your core company is not viable for such project in that ammount of time) - re-licencing just the first step to that. They proved what happens in a "worse case scenario" but I don't think you could have done it without going trough it.
I think as a consumer DB that may have helped. However, if the company (rethinkdb in this case) is still small enough, and the client big enough, than they can work out a contract that states that the source code gets licensed to them in the case of a shutdown.
This allows the company to get larger accounts with no real downside as they would be out of business.
