> They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help)
Unlikely. I genuinely believe Martin Davies is doing it as a service to the Erlang community. bet365 doesn't need to open source anything. They've got deep enough pockets to hire developers to maintain Riak internally for the foreseeable future.
> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?
Yes. There isn't a storage system readily available which offers the same capabilities as Riak. At the scale at which bet365 operates, doing so in a gradual fashion takes years. By capabilities I mean the ability to make different tradeoffs in different use cases. Riak has a nice set of levers to tradeoff consistency for availability. Its built in support for CRDTs is quite amazing.
Unlikely. I genuinely believe Martin Davies is doing it as a service to the Erlang community. bet365 doesn't need to open source anything. They've got deep enough pockets to hire developers to maintain Riak internally for the foreseeable future.
> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?
Yes. There isn't a storage system readily available which offers the same capabilities as Riak. At the scale at which bet365 operates, doing so in a gradual fashion takes years. By capabilities I mean the ability to make different tradeoffs in different use cases. Riak has a nice set of levers to tradeoff consistency for availability. Its built in support for CRDTs is quite amazing.