Congrats, Jan! I think this is great news for you and for CouchDB. Open source projects can benefit a great deal from having some entity provide commercial support. It legitimizes the project and reduces risk.
Good luck, Mike On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear CouchDB Community, > > Chris Anderson, Francesco Cesarini, Marcus Taylor and I are proud to > present CouchDB Ltd., a CouchDB-centered support, consulting, training > & development company. > > Why a commercial entity? I (Jan) have been doing commercial CouchDB > consulting for the last nine months and I simply can't keep up with > the demand. So I started looking for partners. First, meet Francesco > and Marcus of Erlang Training and Consulting. They are providing the > same services we will provide for CouchDB, just for Erlang. With > CouchDB written in Erlang, this couldn't be a better fit. Next up is > Chris. I don't have to tell you how much of CouchDB's success is part > of his work. He's also been working on CouchDB-related things only for > the past months. The Ltd. is simply a way of organizing our efforts > and fulfilling the enormous (really) demand for professional CouchDB > services. > > Where is the catch? — We have a hard time finding one. Chris and I > both live and breath open source and so far, all our commercial > projects have allowed us to contribute back to the CouchDB source or > related open source projects. And we will continue to do so. Instead > of a catch, we believe that this of great benefit for CouchDB and the > community. We'll have two more full-time CouchDB contributers, next to > Damien. Hooray! > > The CouchDB Ltd. website will go live at http://couchdb.com/ in the > next one or two weeks. We'll make sure that there's a link and a note > back to the official website & project on every relevant page. CouchDB > Ltd. is at it's heart an open source company, invested in the success > of CouchDB. We believe that making commercial support available will > extend the range of companies and products that are able and willing > to take a bet on a new technology. > > If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this thread or email > Chris or me directly. > > Thank you all for making CouchDB the phenomenal success it is now! > > Cheers > Jan, Chris, Francesco & Marcus > -- > >
