Yeah, I didn't appreciate Cockroach's blog as a response to RethinkDB's shut down here. Admittedly it is timely, but they don't provide any insight (although with the long blog, it "appears" as though they do) that you and Mike haven't already covered.

I have appreciated the snippets of mentorship that I have gotten from you and Mike (I've interacted with Mike more) - I'm Mark from the GUN team. Here are my thoughts:

RethinkDB's shutdown spells doom for Cockroach. However, I do disagree with you Slava, that the DB market is impossible.

Rethink and Cockroach are both Master-Slave, and I think you hit the nail on the head that that is an impossible market to try and compete in. However, it does not represent the entire DB market (albeit, it is the overwhelming majority).

The market take over is going to happen with P2P/decentralized databases (Cassandra, mine http://gunDB.io/ , even things like IPFS, etc.) because Master-Slave databases have a limit of how large they can scale and shard. Up to another 5B people are coming online into 2020, so the demand alone is going to reshape the industry towards the growing Master-Master databases. Cockroach is in the wrong place.

My company is going through an inflection point, so I'll presumably be one of the guinea pigs. If I'm right, we'll be able to keep all of our technology completely MIT/ZLIB/Apache2 Open Source, yet still grow healthily and fast enough for our VC backing. Why? The inevitable shift to P2P systems is going to require the existing monoliths and governments to get on board and they need experts who have designed those systems. (I'm already seeing this happen with some of our customers and potential clients).

Startups will be able to reap all the benefits for free, even if they get Pokemon Go level hyper growth. Why? Services with hundred million plus users will be the norm, not the enterprise. And their services will become more robust with more users on it. However the dinosaurs, governments, centralized services, etc. will still pay handily in order to keep spying on their users. Unfortunately, users will still use these services because those companies actually make a profit which they re-invest in conveniences that keep users around.

That will be the divide (and has always been) between free and paying DB customers. None of this CCL stuff.