[REPORT] CouchDB

[Jan Lehnardt <ja...@apache.org>]

Dear CouchDB Community,

I just submitted the following quarterly project report to the ASF board.

Best
Jan
—

## Description:
Apache CouchDB software is a document-oriented database that can be queried and 
indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers 
incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention. However, various board members
requested clarification on this item from the last report:

- a rogue source that provided binary builds off of CouchDB master has been
  shut down. Unbeknownst to the project, a good number of critical fixes for
  the 3.0.0 release were found by users of this unauthorized binary provider.
  We are happy to continue to make sure the project complies with ASF policy,
  but we also want to highlight that we benefited from something that was
  technically forbidden, so maybe it is worth reconsidering some of this. Due
  to the release process, we are currently not in the position to bring this
  up in the form of a regular policy change request, we just wanted to flag
  this, in case someone wants to take up this cause.

df: this wasn’t a trademark issue, but rather a third party providing binaries
off of CouchDB `master` to the general public, rather than just dev@, which is
not permitted as per ASF policy.

da: done ;)

rb, curcuru: apologies for not being clearer, this wasn’t just third party
binaries, but binaries off of `master` for the general public.

—

In addition: we appreciate the guidance on permitting HTML emails on-list.


## Membership Data:
Apache CouchDB was founded 2008-11-19 (11 years ago)
There are currently 67 committers and 16 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 9:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- Jonathan Hall was added to the PMC on 2020-02-12
- Deni Burroughs was added as committer on 2020-02-15
- Alessio Biancalana was added as committer on 2020-02-27
- Juanjo Rodriguez was added as committer on 2020-02-07

## Project Activity:
- Released 3.0.0 to great success and accolades.
  - see https://blog.couchdb.org/2020/02/26/the-road-to-couchdb-3-0/ for details
- We’re seeing increased beginner support inquiries on our various channels
  which we attribute to the major version release.
- Started 3.0.1 and 3.1.0 release processes.
- Continued work on 4.0 design and development (see previous reports for
  details).

## Community Health:

Significantly increased mailing list, GitHub and (unofficial) Slack usage
supports increased project buzz post 3.0.0. We’re happy and chugging along.