2009/3/6 Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]>: > 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 > -- > >
Launching such service is a good idee, and I would say "bravo". But I think this is unfair to use couchdb name as a company and using the "couchdb.com" as website. Unfair for all other projects coming or existing that (would) provide such service or any commercial service based on couchdb. It mean for common people that couchdb is an opensource project given by a a commercial service ie people who use .com as default and people who will search for couchdb in search engines. Imo this a bad idee. By doing this you create another company, which was not the promise given at first by the couchdb project. I hope it's still time to change the name of the company and its website url. Couchdb was and is currently for me an open source project first, this isn't the case if you use this name as a commercial entity. And it may be the same for other people. More over, why people would want to spread the couchdb name in the future if it is just to give some indirect advertising for a company ? Creating "Couchdb ltd" and any company using this name (i hope not) remove some freedom to the source and the promise of independant development (maybe it won't but I speak about promise). If you want some endorsement (and you don't need it...), that make you one provider couchdb service and a good provider (which it is since you are developers in couchdb opensource project), why not just make a page on couchdb that link to your service and use another name. That's would be better. That said. I just would like to add i'm not against such service. That's not the point. I like this idee and I hope it will work for you. What I dislike, and I'm strongly against it, is that you use couchdb name for **your** service. For me that mean i have to reconsider the way I endorse couchdb in my projects and I feel bad. I really hope you don't already make any legal administrative stuff about it and that your are ok to change/think about another name. - benoît.
