Though the comments here so far seem positive, there has also been a lot of negative backlash, primarily out of privacy concerns.<p>Elliot Murphy posted a comment on LWN clarifying his message (comment here: <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/356947/</a> attached to parent <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/356911/</a>). The most relevant part is this: "It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)"<p>In other words, this is an optional service that you can choose to use -- no default install is going to send your info to Canonical.
The awesome part about it is that your database can be very easily replicated "to the cloud" for backup/sharing purposes.<p>This is an attractive feature of CouchDB that I'm considering for a web application too.