Folks,
I've been lurking on the list for a while, and following the recent
conversation with some fascination and trepidation. I'm just beginning
to develop some capabilities that build on Couch, that will require more
robust replication capabilities than currently exist - and seriously
thinking about working on those. But... the recent discussions give me
a lot of pause - bespeaking some of the same kinds of loss of momentum
and fracturing that happen when any project forks (which is really what
seems to have happened).
It seems pretty clear that the original vision and drive for CouchDB
came from Damien, and it's now less clear who's providing vision and
drive for the project -- a review of the roadmap suggests that the focus
right now is bug fixes and incremental feature addition. Not
necessarily a bad thing, but suggestive of a maintenance effort. But
then again, there are efforts that have found their way under the Apache
umbrella and not really thrived.
Which leads to a couple of questions for consideration:
1. Who is really driving CouchDB right now? Is there an individual or
core group who are really providing vision and momentum (some folks are
obvious, but where are priorities)? How do the players overlap with the
various other efforts going on. In other words: what's the ecosystem
for Couch and Couch-related software, projects, ....? (Can't tell the
players without a scorecard.)
2. It would be particularly helpful to those of us new to the project
to see a NEW summary of what it is that defines CouchDB, particularly as
distinct from the various efforts that have spun out of Couch, and
what's the current vision/priority for the future. What are the core
capabilities provided, core mechanisms, .... ?
Sort of strikes me a bit like what happened when Ubuntu showed up. It's
still not clear how it relates to Debian.
Miles Fidelman
--
Miles Fidelman, Principal
Protocol Technologies Group, LLC
617-538-9249 - [email protected]
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
