Damien Katz Steps Away from Open Source, Incurs Criticism

by Angela Guess

Josette Rigsby reports, “Damien Katz, creator of NoSQL repository CouchDB, announced via his blog that he and members of his team are stepping away from the open source, community-managed Apache CouchDB project to focus on commercial venture Couchbase, formed in early 2011 when CouchOne and Membase merged. The announcement sparked criticism and a bit of outrage from supporters of open source.”

Rigsby continues, “According to Katz, his team will implement significant portions of the next version of Couchbase in C/C++ instead of Erlang to optimize the repository’s performance. (Since there is no such language, I’m assuming he means C++.) It is unlikely that such a major shift would have been approved with a community consensus approach to delivery. The Apache Software Foundation has managed CouchDB since its inception. The product has several features like local replication and support for mobile development that propelled it to a leadership position in the NoSQL market. However, according to Katz, the project has outgrown the model.”

Katz wrote on his blog, “And now, as it turns out, I have a chance to do it all again, without the pain of starting from scratch. Building on the previous Apache CouchDB and Membase projects, throwing out what didn’t work, and strengthening what does, and advancing great technologies to make something that is developer friendly, high performance, designed for mission critical deployment and mobile integration, and can move faster and more responsively to users and customers needs than a community based project.”

Read more here.

photo credit: rick

Tags: Apache, Couchbase, CouchDB, criticism, Damien Katz, Josette Rigsby, NoSQL, open-source

This entry was posted on January 9, 2012 at 10:49 am and is filed under Analytics, Big Data, Data Daily, Data Topics, News, NoSQL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.