It's great market but things are very competitive. If you are starting a business, you won't succeed unless you bring some unique value to the table.
Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support.
RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product.
Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work.
In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.
Open source means that all value and good ideas turn into commodities. Whatever mongo did ten years ago that set them apart is now a commodity. You can get it from dozens of different OSS products that have since built similar features or that have been created since then. That does not devalue mongo's product and they seem to be making some nice profits monetizing it. It's just that their value proposition has now shifted to hosting and support.
RethinkDB as a database actually did not fail. It's just the company behind it that failed. And strictly speaking, it merely failed to deliver on unrealistic expectations its investors had. Companies fail all the time; usually it has to do with product market fit, figuring out a sane business model, etc. However, the database still exists. People still use it. People still work on it. I've never used it myself. But it looks like an interesting product.
Whining that people won't pay for a database is pointless. There are plenty of successful companies making money from their OSS software. Most companies don't get to be unicorns though. That's disappointing if you are a VC but otherwise not even a goal for many healthy companies that are just looking to make healthy profits doing honest work.
In this case, VCs helped fund an unsuccessful company that happened to have created a successful product. That happens a lot in that world. VCs pay for people to take risks and sometimes that just doesn't work out and they walk away from it. But because it was open source, they are the only ones that lost. Mysql has seen many companies come and go but the product seems to stick around. Same for Postgresql. Both have a very healthy ecosystem of large and small players depending on and making money with these products. Some of these are unicorns even.