I can't help but think that this announcement is 5 years too late. 5 years ago the field for write-optimized database was wide open and obviously there was a lot of demand for such a product or otherwise companies like facebook and Powerset wouldn't have had to write their own versions.
But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-optimized databases.
If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.
But since there was no open source software available for this usecase back then, they did write their own, which became Cassandra and HBase. And now these SSTable type of solutions have become the de facto standard for write-optimized databases.
If Tokutek had open sourced TokuDB from the very beginning things could have turned out very differently. TofuDB had an huge advantage over Cassandra/HBase in being SQL-oriented and based on MySQL, whereas Cassandra/HBase required a much steeper learning curve. But since TokuDB was proprietary, it never really gained much traction.