<p>Community is at the heart of any Apache Open Source project; its members voluntarily create and collaborate on building software products for the public good. If there isn't an active, vibrant, productive community working on a project, chances are good that there is no Open Source software available to lead a particular field.</p><p>And that can be a big problem.</p><p>It's one the CouchDB community has now solved, thanks to a big contribution by Cloudant. The company announced today the merger of BigCouch, its highly available, fault-tolerant, clustered & API-compliant version of Apache CouchDB, into the Apache project.</p><p>It's news worth repeating; Cloudant is taking its intellectual property a significant bit of code that it has spent time (five years) and money developing for its own commercial purposes, and giving it to the project no fees or conditions attached.</p><p><a href="http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/cloudant-breathes-life-into-couchdb-merges-bigcouch-into-apache-project-021806.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=facebookfeed&utm_campaign=Social%20Media%20(Facebook)">Keep reading...</a></p>