Re: Couch Vision (was: Couchbase trademark issues)

[Noah Slater <ns...@tumbolia.org>]

Miles,

Thank you for taking the time to write. Apologies for the delayed response.

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:50 AM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net
> wrote:

> 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.
>

Damien was the progenitor of CouchDB, and he contributed a huge chunk of
the original vision. But ever since there has been more than just Damien,
the project's vision and drive has been shared. Jan was the first to join
Damien, and I was the second, over five years ago. We now have 14
committers in total. And the CouchDB Project Management Committee provides
additional governance and steerage.

It is unfortunate that Damien decided to leave the project, but the ASF is
set up, specifically, so that projects do not stagnate away when one person
leaves. Damien was "just another comitter" in the eyes of the Apache way,
in any case, he had not even been active in the year prior to his
departure. We're very fortunate actually. CouchDB has a thriving community.
So I know we'll be fine.

We do not have a roadmap at the moment. Which is a bad thing. We should
have a roadmap. But you suggest that it doesn't look like we're planning to
do anything besides bug fixes and incremental feature addition. Isn't that
how most products evolve? What sort of thing were you hoping for? One very
big change on the (in my head) roadmap is the merging of BigCouch in to
CouchDB.

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.)
>

With the departure of Damien, I have been talking a lot to Jan about things
we can do to help kick things up the arse a little bit. We both feel like
we've been neglectful, and want to use this as an opportunity to double
down our efforts, and inject this community and this project with a bit of
love again.

I have a few things up my sleave, but they can wait until after 1.2.0 is
released.

We're not the only ones prompted in to action by the recent events.
Cloudant used Damien's departure as a prompt to announce that they were
donating BigCouch to the project. I know that other individuals too, from
the PMC, the committers, and the wider community, have been rallying
together.

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, .... ?
>

That's a great suggestion, and we definitely need something like that.

Watch this space.


> Sort of strikes me a bit like what happened when Ubuntu showed up.  It's
> still not clear how it relates to Debian.


As an ex-Debian developer, that's a bit of a sore point. ;)

Re: Couch Vision (was: Couchbase trademark issues)

[Dirkjan Ochtman <di...@ochtman.nl>]

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 22:31, Noah Slater <ns...@tumbolia.org> wrote:
> With the departure of Damien, I have been talking a lot to Jan about things
> we can do to help kick things up the arse a little bit. We both feel like
> we've been neglectful, and want to use this as an opportunity to double
> down our efforts, and inject this community and this project with a bit of
> love again.

It's been noticed, and appreciated.

Cheers,

Dirkjan

Re: Couch Vision

[Miles Fidelman <mf...@meetinghouse.net>]

Noah,

Noah Slater wrote:
> Miles,
>
> Thank you for taking the time to write. Apologies for the delayed response.
Thanks for the reply and the details.  I was afraid my comments were 
falling on deaf ears, or that I'd offended folks.

Glad to hear that Couch is still alive and well - I'm about ready to 
commit to using it on a major project, and recent developments have 
given me some pause.  (Also, I just think that Couch is plain cool.)

> It is unfortunate that Damien decided to leave the project, but the ASF is
> set up, specifically, so that projects do not stagnate away when one person
> leaves. Damien was "just another comitter" in the eyes of the Apache way,
> in any case, he had not even been active in the year prior to his
> departure. We're very fortunate actually. CouchDB has a thriving community.
> So I know we'll be fine.

Well sometimes.... I've seen different levels of momentum for different 
ASF projects.  It still seems to be very dependent on having a committed 
core team.  Also, ASF seems to have an awful lot of Java-based projects, 
where Couch is erlang-based.

> We do not have a roadmap at the moment. Which is a bad thing. We should
> have a roadmap. But you suggest that it doesn't look like we're planning to
> do anything besides bug fixes and incremental feature addition. Isn't that
> how most products evolve? What sort of thing were you hoping for? One very
> big change on the (in my head) roadmap is the merging of BigCouch in to
> CouchDB.

It's always struck me that the replication mechanisms are a lot less 
robust than advertised.  Great PowerPoints, but scalability seems 
lacking, and the need to set up pair-wise replication seems 
unmanageable.  I hadn't realized that the BigCouch code was being 
integrated - that's important.  (I keep thinking that a multi-cast 
publish-subscribe update mechanism - something like a gossip protocol - 
would be a key next step.  Something like that may come out of what 
we're working on, but not for a while.)
> 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.)
>>
> With the departure of Damien, I have been talking a lot to Jan about things
> we can do to help kick things up the arse a little bit. We both feel like
> we've been neglectful, and want to use this as an opportunity to double
> down our efforts, and inject this community and this project with a bit of
> love again.
That's good to know.

> We're not the only ones prompted in to action by the recent events.
> Cloudant used Damien's departure as a prompt to announce that they were
> donating BigCouch to the project. I know that other individuals too, from
> the PMC, the committers, and the wider community, have been rallying
> together.
As is that!

> 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, .... ?
>>
> That's a great suggestion, and we definitely need something like that.
>
> Watch this space.

Cool.
>> Sort of strikes me a bit like what happened when Ubuntu showed up.  It's
>> still not clear how it relates to Debian.
>
> As an ex-Debian developer, that's a bit of a sore point. ;)
>
As a Debian user, too.  Sigh...

Cheers,

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra