CouchOne abandoned any sort of marketing effort around CouchDB long before they got acquired by Membase. Since then, they have focused their attention solely on marketing the Couchbase brand, with close to zero time spent evangelizing Apache CouchDB. The other CouchDB “vendor”, Cloudant (who I work for) never had much of a marketing budget, so we spent no time marketing CouchDB either (we focused on building and marketing our own products, open-source BigCouch and hosted Cloudant).
This situation did not catch us by surprise; I flagged this as a potential issue at Cloudant and had conversations about it with the CouchOne guys back in January 2011.
What you see here is just what happens to open-source technologies when nobody spends time evangelizing them — and when maybe, just maybe, they’re not hip enough to get self-sustaining traction. I love CouchDB to pieces and believe it's an immensely useful tool with great things in its future — but it has long stopped being cool, compared to the MongoDBs and Nodes of this world. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing… Strong communities are not built on shallow attraction.)
So yes, both vendors decided to focus their limited resources on advertising their own products (successfully & deservedly so, I would argue) but I think the success & money that phase brings in will undoubtedly be funneled back into even more evangelizing & involvement in Apache CouchDB. (I'm speaking for Cloudant at least, don’t know what Couchbase’s open-source plans are for Apache CouchDB.)
This was a good analysis of why the prominent CouchDB companies didn't spent time/money evangelizing the project but it didn't cover the dramatic difference w/ how 10gen handles MongoDB.
10gen spends all their time and money marketing MongoDB. They appear to spend more marketing it than on engineering it. They can afford to do this because their "product" is MongoDB and not an alternative MongoDB based product like the prominent CouchDB companies.
Very little attention is paid to the fact that MongoDB is AGPL and that they are one of the first companies to bring the extortionware business model of the GPL to software as a service via AGPL.
This situation did not catch us by surprise; I flagged this as a potential issue at Cloudant and had conversations about it with the CouchOne guys back in January 2011.
What you see here is just what happens to open-source technologies when nobody spends time evangelizing them — and when maybe, just maybe, they’re not hip enough to get self-sustaining traction. I love CouchDB to pieces and believe it's an immensely useful tool with great things in its future — but it has long stopped being cool, compared to the MongoDBs and Nodes of this world. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing… Strong communities are not built on shallow attraction.)
So yes, both vendors decided to focus their limited resources on advertising their own products (successfully & deservedly so, I would argue) but I think the success & money that phase brings in will undoubtedly be funneled back into even more evangelizing & involvement in Apache CouchDB. (I'm speaking for Cloudant at least, don’t know what Couchbase’s open-source plans are for Apache CouchDB.)