5 ms·

CouchDB retrospective

75 points by bhaisaab 14y ago

smegel 14y ago
Misleading headline, this is about CouchDB and only tangentially ASF.
- bhaisaab 14y ago
  Couch is ASF project, ASF is sum of all its committers, so...
  - olliesaunders 14y ago
    Yes but he talks about how it was the initial 3 contributors of Couch that created the culture that is so important to the quality of the community they currently have.
    - hrabago 14y ago
      He's comparing the experience of being an open source project under ASF to that of being a free software advocate for gnu.org. This is when he mentions loving the community more than the code.
      - bhaisaab 14y ago
        Exactly. Maybe we can learn from ASF in that regard and pull in some of the philosophy to opensource orgs such as the GNU, the Linux, the VideoLAN of the worlds; in my experience, you don't get much love as a newbie in most of those projects (in comparison)
      - Evbn 14y ago
        Huh,I always thought of FSF/GNU as retirement homes for ancient projects more than code more than active coding. I have contributed code to ASF but I don't even know where to look for the repos and bug trackers. But grep and emacs feet occasional releases, so maybe my observation is of the effect, not the intent.
  - smegel 14y ago
    When submitting links in future you should probably just stick with the original blog title, which in this case was "CouchDB retrospective" - a succinct and accurate representation of the actual topic being blogged about.
    - bhaisaab 14y ago
      Alright, I intended to post this: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code which is about the link I posted, so...
      - Evbn 14y ago
        Which has an unclosable popup ad for its onsite, covering most of the content.
jacques_chester 14y ago
Well that was nice. ... um. Now what?
grey-area 14y ago
I love CouchDB, but I love the CouchDB community even more. I think we made the important decision to cultivate community right from the start. One of the key components in getting that right turns out to be the concept of a community gatekeeper, or steward. Someone to guide things back in the right direction when they get off-track. Someone to set an example. On the very few occasions someone has threatened the atmosphere on the lists and in the IRC channel, it has been nice to see people defend it with passion and with humility. When those people see how things work here, and how committed we are to keeping the grass green and not letting the project become mired by useless arguments and petty aggression, they either adjust or they leave. Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities. Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
- kijin 14y ago
  > I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall. But does the "community overall" need any saving? The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name. I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.
rkalla 14y ago
FWIW, this was written in July of 2010 (2+ years ago) -- CouchDB is in a very different place now than it was then. Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_ different experiences. CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code). Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are NOTHING but "How do I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists). CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly ignored for 10 years) With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with open-source) I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so quiet is due to the rather public split of the community brought upon by the introduction of Couchbase. Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.

75 points by bhaisaab 14y ago

smegel 14y ago

Misleading headline, this is about CouchDB and only tangentially ASF.

bhaisaab 14y ago
Couch is ASF project, ASF is sum of all its committers, so...
- olliesaunders 14y ago
  Yes but he talks about how it was the initial 3 contributors of Couch that created the culture that is so important to the quality of the community they currently have.
  - hrabago 14y ago
    He's comparing the experience of being an open source project under ASF to that of being a free software advocate for gnu.org. This is when he mentions loving the community more than the code.
    - bhaisaab 14y ago
      Exactly. Maybe we can learn from ASF in that regard and pull in some of the philosophy to opensource orgs such as the GNU, the Linux, the VideoLAN of the worlds; in my experience, you don't get much love as a newbie in most of those projects (in comparison)
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Huh,I always thought of FSF/GNU as retirement homes for ancient projects more than code more than active coding. I have contributed code to ASF but I don't even know where to look for the repos and bug trackers. But grep and emacs feet occasional releases, so maybe my observation is of the effect, not the intent.
- smegel 14y ago
  When submitting links in future you should probably just stick with the original blog title, which in this case was "CouchDB retrospective" - a succinct and accurate representation of the actual topic being blogged about.
  - bhaisaab 14y ago
    Alright, I intended to post this: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code which is about the link I posted, so...
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Which has an unclosable popup ad for its onsite, covering most of the content.

jacques_chester 14y ago

Well that was nice. ... um. Now what?

grey-area 14y ago

I love CouchDB, but I love the CouchDB community even more. I think we made the important decision to cultivate community right from the start. One of the key components in getting that right turns out to be the concept of a community gatekeeper, or steward. Someone to guide things back in the right direction when they get off-track. Someone to set an example. On the very few occasions someone has threatened the atmosphere on the lists and in the IRC channel, it has been nice to see people defend it with passion and with humility. When those people see how things work here, and how committed we are to keeping the grass green and not letting the project become mired by useless arguments and petty aggression, they either adjust or they leave. Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities. Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.

kijin 14y ago
> I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall. But does the "community overall" need any saving? The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name. I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.

rkalla 14y ago

FWIW, this was written in July of 2010 (2+ years ago) -- CouchDB is in a very different place now than it was then. Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_ different experiences. CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code). Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are NOTHING but "How do I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists). CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly ignored for 10 years) With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with open-source) I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0

georgemcbay 14y ago
I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so quiet is due to the rather public split of the community brought upon by the introduction of Couchbase. Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.