CouchDB (Couch is an acronym for cluster of unreliable commodity hardware)[3] is a project created in April 2005 by Damien Katz, former Lotus Notes developer at IBM. Damien Katz defined it as a "storage system for a large scale object database". His objectives for the database were to become the database of the Internet and that it would be designed from the ground up to serve web applications. He self-funded the project for almost two years and released it as an open source project under the GNU General Public License.
In February 2008, it became an Apache Incubator project and the license was changed to the Apache License.[4] A few months after, it graduated to a top-level project.[5] This led to the first stable version being released in July 2010.[6]
In early 2012, Damien Katz left the project to focus on Couchbase Server.[7]
Since the departure of Damien Katz, the Apache CouchDB project has continued, releasing 1.2 in April 2012 and 1.3 in April 2013. In July 2013, the CouchDB community merged the codebase for BigCouch, Cloudant's clustered version of CouchDB, into the Apache project. The BigCouch clustering framework is prepared to be included in an upcoming release of Apache CouchDB