> A negative report could generate the opposite though. Are they ready to bet the new $12M+ on that?
I disagree; it all depends on how they act upon it.
So worst case scenario he finds something deeply flawed. What does RethinkDB do? Work to fix it while communicating and being responsive to the development community. Show developers that you're humble and, more importantly, you listen and fix things. That would generate a good amount of good will, in my opinion.
Exactly! And if some company is reluctant to do this in the open, they could use him for QA. That is, pay him to do a preliminary test, then fix things, run the tests again, fix again,... until there are no more critical issues. Of course the resulting blog post should then outline the whole process.
Everyone makes mistakes - what matters is what you do to discover and fix them.
I disagree; it all depends on how they act upon it.
So worst case scenario he finds something deeply flawed. What does RethinkDB do? Work to fix it while communicating and being responsive to the development community. Show developers that you're humble and, more importantly, you listen and fix things. That would generate a good amount of good will, in my opinion.