Hello,
On 08/07/19 1:32 PM, Robert Samuel Newson wrote:
Hi,
I understand what marketing is, but I also understand how this project
is organised. The dev@ mailing list is where project direction and
development is discussed, and where all decisions must be made, which
is why I asked that the conversation moved here. Not many are signed
up to the marketing mailing list.
I hear and share your concerns about “IBM employees” (and I am one,
but was not one for the majority of my involvement with CouchDB, like
all the others that are now IBM employees). We have bylaws and a code
of conduct and a PMC with many non-IBM employees. It should go without
saying that those committers and PMC members who are also IBM
employees are mature adults capable of working in open source with
integrity. Were that ever to stop being the case, there would be
consequences.
The conversations about future direction (foundationdb et al) happened
here on this mailing list and everyone was welcome to raise the
concerns you did. Those conversations, and RFC’s, will continue to
happen here. Ultimately, the project moves forward in the direction
that active contributions take it under the watchful eye of the PMC.
Chitan’s thoughts on IoT are very welcome, which is why I wanted the
conversation here, where project ideas can be discussed with everyone
interested in them. I also hope my reply that pointed out why CouchDB
is not yet ideal for IoT was constructive. It is not just a question
of marketing CouchDB as it is today, it should inform CouchDB project
direction.
B.
either
Johs raised some genuine concerns.We all are raising our voice/concern
because we believe in CouchDB. I have failed to see the masses love it
as I do. I have been using CouchDB for around 1.5 years, probably lot
lesser than most other subscribers here. In this time, I quickly
realized that CouchDB is sitting on an underutilized goldmine. I share
the concerns raised by Johs regarding unclear market, lack of unique
competitive advantage, and unclear future direction while keeping
existing user base. These are all the things that confused me in 2016
while deciding a suitable NoSQL Document DB for my use case. After
trying 3 NoSQL Document DB, I was lucky to finally choose CouchDB.
Robert, I understand bylaws and other rules in place are for us to keep
this civil, maintainable, and organized.
We are living in an era where products are consumer centric and some
discussions will not have a clear boundary. The discussions will revolve
around tech and market. Most of the time we will end up discussing both.
We will talk about arising the customer/developer/industry needs and how
we can build CouchDB which helps them excel. I see why IoT stuff cannot
be done right now. And I wouldn't recommend as it is today.
CouchDB led the way by realizing that future infrastructure will hugely
rely on HTTP and built the first DB with a HTTP API for accessing and
manipulating data. Newer advancements in technologies will always demand
us to rethink our market position. We need to discuss that few years
from now when IoTs, spatial/location-based services(drones, self-driving
vehicles), analytic, etc. are the new normal then who will still use
CouchDB despite other products in the market. Once we have figured who
we want to build for, we all can start focusing on building it.
PS: If you have 180 seconds to kill: https://youtu.be/DFeeNLElBgU
Regards
Chintan
On 8 Jul 2019, at 07:08, Johs Ensby <j...@b2w.com> wrote:
I find Chitan's reflections very interesting,
even if the current direction for CouchDB points in a different
direction.
The problem is that CouchDBs future is difficult to understand, as
marketing discussions are discouraged.
This is a very good example of how it is done:
Briefly, this mailing list is for marketing only. If you wish to
discuss project direction, post to the dev mailing list instead.
This reveils a total lack of basic understanding of what marketing is.
Just as a hint: Marketing is not the same as promotion. Marketing is
a concept and a dicipline that arose in the 1960's as two previous
concepts failed to capture the challenge of bringing products to the
market.
The "producion concept" worked as long as the market was underserved
and you could focus on production, the market would swallow all
available products (early days of mass production and hitech dev)
The "sales concept" was characterized by strategies for pushing the
products to market.
The "marketing concept" turned the whole thing around and focused on
identifying needs and wants in the market to which products could be
developed in order to create value for the user/customer.
A definition of marketing used by my professor at Harvard Business
School was: Marketing is to create value and retain a fair share of
that value.
The notion that writing blog posts is marketing, unfortunately brings
us to the pre-1960's thinking of how to bring a product to market.
I am increasingly worried about the CouchDB project being dominated
by IBM employees, and that new versions will require major workovers
of CouchDB without concern as to:
- what market is targeted
- what competitive position in this market is being targeted
- how to build on the existing user base for future success
The latter point is crucial in order to make any technology adoption
work, this is based on another theory that has been known since the
60's ("The diffusion of innovation" by Everett Rogers), popularised
and brought to hitech in the early 90's by Jeff More's "Crossing the
chasm".
Chitans reflections on how to serve markets in need of new solutions
is the kind of marketing discussion that CouchDB would benefit
greatly from inviting.
johs
On 7 Jul 2019, at 19:55, Robert Samuel Newson <rnew...@apache.org>
wrote:
Hi,
The main (current) difficulties in running CouchDB on embedded
devices is running erlang there coupled with our clustering stack.
To scale everything down to fit within the typical constraints of an
embedded device requires effort, I don’t think couch “just works” there.
The future release that replaces the clustering technology with
FoundationDB is what I refer to by “getting harder in the future”.
While fdb does scale down well, it might still need porting to
platforms it’s not currently supported on.
As for suitability for IoT, couch is certainly used in that field,
but care must be taken, especially around the core notion that couch
retains information about a deleted document forever. This small
amount of data can build up, and you need to plan for it.
B.
On 7 Jul 2019, at 08:02, Chintan Mishra <chin...@rebhu.com> wrote:
Dear team,
Quoting myself from <market...@couchdb.apache.org>
----
3. A *way forward for CouchDB is focusing on what it is best*at viz.,
being a database for _*C*__luster __*O*__f __*U*__nreliable
__*C*__ommodity __*H*__ardware_. Being deploy-able at edge devices.
Focusing on this will invite people building for IoTs towards
CouchDB. And this will drive a whole new set of users/customers
towards CouchDB and IBM's Cloudant project. We already use
Cloudant's sync-android and CDTDatastore in our startup's(Rebhu
Computing) product.
----
I would like to draw attention to this point. I firmly believe that
CouchDB can benefit by targeting IoT device developers. IoT
developers don't want to worry about sending data from edge devices
to server for processing. CouchDB already has battle-tested
replication strategy. Extending this for IoT devs will drive the
next age developers. CouchDB is already made for unreliable systems
and what is more unreliable than an IoT lying in the sea connected
with worldwide GSM/CDMA (2G) network.
Quoting Robert Newson's <rnew...@apache.org> response
It’s a good point but not for the marketing list unless you are
talking just about producing blog posts or other materials to
promote couchdb for that market?
I think to make couchdb more useful for iot would require some
development work. Running couchdb on embedded devices is already a
challenge and it’s only going to get harder in future. As a server
side hub, the retention of a small amount of data after document
deletion presents further problems.
Briefly, this mailing list is for marketing only. If you wish to
discuss project direction, post to the dev mailing list instead.
Thanks.
@Robert_Newson can you shed some light on the issues that arise
while deploying CouchDB on embedded devices? Also, what is going to
get harder in the future?
--
Chintan Mishra
Founder and CEO
Rebhu Computing
