Great Moments in Fragmentation (CouchDB edition)

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Damien Katz writes:

What's the future of CouchDB? It's Couchbase.
Huh? So what about Apache CouchDB? Well, that's a great project. I founded it, coded the earliest versions almost completely myself, I've spent a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears on it. I'm very proud of it and the impact it's had. And now I, and the Couchbase team, are mostly moving on. It's not that we think CouchDB isn't awesome. It's that we are creating the successor to it: Couchbase Server. A product and project with similar capabilities and goals, but more faster, more scalable, more customer and developer focused. And definitely not part of Apache.
...
If it sounds like I'm saying Apache was a mistake, I'm not. Apache was a big part in the success of CouchDB, without it CouchDB would not have enjoyed the early success it did. But in my opinion it's reached a point where the consensus based approach has limited the competitiveness of the project. It's not personal, it's business.
The said thing about all of this is, there are two issues be-deviling couchDB as it stands today, front-end caching, and back-end scaling.
The back-end scaling is handled quite wonderfully by BigCouch, (think Dynamo + CouchDB), but pretty much everybody rolls their own for front-end caching (lord knows, we did, with mnesia, and a bunch-o other erlang.
My hope had always been that we would end up with some version of bigCouchBase, but as of now, that hope is pretty much dashed.

Damien can choose to do what he wants - I wish him all the best (as I wish anyone the best in whatever they want to do), but when he sez. 
               What's the future of CouchDB? It's Couchbase.
 The correct way to have said this would be more along the lines of 
               The future of CouchDB, the way I see it, is Couchbase.

Furthermore, when he sez. 
               If it sounds like I'm saying Apache was a mistake, I'm not
 well, this is something I've seen back in Julius Caeser (Act 3, Scene 2), when Mark Antony sez.
               And Brutus is an honorable man

Thats pretty much all I have to say about this.
In the end - disappointed.  Not as much in CouchDB, which I expect to come out quite well from this (last I checked, Damien himself hasn't committed in a long time), but more in how Damien handled himself in all of this - I'm disappointed for him...

Update - Adam Kocoloski (of BigCouch fame) has a rebuttal response
Today we announce our intent to contribute [bigcouch] back to the community. Working with the ASF and the CouchDB community, we hope to integrate the core capabilities of BigCouch into Apache CouchDB. Hopefully this will put to rest the tired (and false) “CouchDB doesn’t scale” meme. BigCouch forms the bedrock of a globally distributed, sophisticated technology stack that we’ve had in production operation for over two years at scale
Thats one piece of the puzzle, the back-end infrastructure of couchDB will, officially be BigCouch.  I couldn't be happier...



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