CouchBase has been, is and will be open source
Last week I wrote about CouchDB founder and Couchbase developer Damien Katz announcing that he and his team would be concentrating on CouchBase Server and not CouchDB going forward. In his blog post explaining why Katz mentioned that while the Apache Foundation was a great place to start CouchDB, he found that consensus based, community approach did not fit his and his companies needs now.
Many in the industry and the CouchDB community did not take this news well. It felt a little like a rug being pulled out from under them, especially as there was not an easy and clear migration path from CouchDB to CouchBase. Others felt it was abandoning an open source project. In my article I inadvertently game the impression that CouchBase was moving away from open source all together. That is not fact.
I had a chance to speak this week with James Phillips and Bob Wiederhold of Couchbase. They both emphasized that Couchbase and Membase before that have been, still are and will always be open sourced. In fact they are licensed under an Apache 2.0 license. Kind of ironic don’t you think that while Katz wanted to move away from Apache, the Couchbase software is still and will be licensed under the Apache license?
Really though, one thing has nothing to do with the other. The Apache license is a widely respected OSI license. But putting your project under the Apache.org umbrella is a “feather of a different color”. I think that was what Katz was getting at.
In any event while Couchbase is open source and licensed under Apache, the company is of course offering a commercial version of the server that comes with all of the bells and whistles, support and service. Both Phillips and Wiederhold are very bullish (you wouldn’t expect them not to be) on CouchBases’s prospects for the coming year. They say the NoSQL space is poised to continue its explosive growth despite some folks who think the whole NoSQL thing doesn’t work and will fizzle out.
It will be interesting to see how it develops as there is certainly no shortage of competition in the space now. They will all be vying for leadership and being open source may or may not be a huge advantage. What do you think?
