J Chris Anderson -Representative of Apache CouchDB gave us an exclusive interview to introduce this post-relational database to the FCA readers. Let's discover CouchDB, its components, its users and how open-source makes it a strong product.
What is the story behind CouchDB?
CouchDB is a leader among the post-relational databases. The project was started by Damien Katz in 2005, and joined Apache in 2008. CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant, document database built for the web. It stores documents in JSON format, and is accessed via HTTP, making it ideal for use in web applications. It also has world-class replication facilities, which allow users to work with applications, even when disconnected from the network, and share their changes with other users when they come back online. Due to the fault-tolerant reliable storage engine, small runtime size, and offline replication, CouchDB is also ideal for deployment to mobile phones and other environments with unreliable network access.
How many companies use CouchDB?
Too many to count. The short list includes the BBC, IBM, Meebo.com, Mozilla, Facebook, and Canonical, which includes CouchDB as part of the Ubuntu desktop Linux operating system. For more case studies, see http://couch.io/case-studies
Does any large corporation use CouchDB? How many users?
BBC services millions of requests a day, storing homepage customizations for its visitors in CouchDB. CouchDB is on tens of millions of desktops as part of Ubuntu Linux, and Canonical hosts CouchDB in the cloud as part of the Ubuntu One service.
From your point of view, what brings the open source distribution to CouchDB? How do you contribute to open source?
CouchDB has benefited tremendously from being part of the Apache project, for community, technical, and legal reasons. At my company, Couchio, we strive to make all of our work open-source by default, only holding back code in rare exceptions. We find being an open source company gives us a huge advantage in hiring great engineers. The CouchDB community is vibrant and active, with thousands of messages on its various mailing lists and forums each month. There have been over 50 individuals who've made substantial contributions to the project and codebase.
What do you think about TIO Libre definition here: http://www.tiolibre.com/guideline/tiolibre-Libre.Definition?
Neat. Looks like a good way to reframe the software freedom discourse. Using CouchDB as a web-based database will for sure give you 100% of both Openness and Libre. I like to use the phrase "data portability by default" when describing CouchDB. It would depend on the service provider if you also get Loyalty. This is a good 3rd addition to the conversation. Most people stop thinking once they get to Libre. I think our company (Couchio) should strive to the Loyalty level, but we are still working on the technical infrastructure, so we haven't had time to put into place policies around the social / legal aspects that Loyalty comments on. I don't know enough to say what level Cloudant (another of the CouchDB hosting companies) would be on this chart, but they definitely have Openness.
Interview by Elodie Pot - writer
Apache - http://www.apache.org
CouchDB- http://couchdb.apache.org
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