Dear CouchDB Community,

Chris Anderson, Francesco Cesarini, Marcus Taylor and I are proud to present CouchDB Ltd., a CouchDB-centered support, consulting, training & development company.

Why a commercial entity? I (Jan) have been doing commercial CouchDB consulting for the last nine months and I simply can't keep up with the demand. So I started looking for partners. First, meet Francesco and Marcus of Erlang Training and Consulting. They are providing the same services we will provide for CouchDB, just for Erlang. With CouchDB written in Erlang, this couldn't be a better fit. Next up is Chris. I don't have to tell you how much of CouchDB's success is part of his work. He's also been working on CouchDB-related things only for the past months. The Ltd. is simply a way of organizing our efforts and fulfilling the enormous (really) demand for professional CouchDB services.

Where is the catch? — We have a hard time finding one. Chris and I both live and breath open source and so far, all our commercial projects have allowed us to contribute back to the CouchDB source or related open source projects. And we will continue to do so. Instead of a catch, we believe that this of great benefit for CouchDB and the community. We'll have two more full-time CouchDB contributers, next to Damien. Hooray!

The CouchDB Ltd. website will go live at http://couchdb.com/ in the next one or two weeks. We'll make sure that there's a link and a note back to the official website & project on every relevant page. CouchDB Ltd. is at it's heart an open source company, invested in the success of CouchDB. We believe that making commercial support available will extend the range of companies and products that are able and willing to take a bet on a new technology.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this thread or email Chris or me directly.

Thank you all for making CouchDB the phenomenal success it is now!

Cheers Jan, Chris, Francesco & Marcus