Independent of how you may feel about Monsanto (and industrial agriculture in general), this is good news for Cloudant -- both an endorsement of their technology by a technically-competent buyer, and a bunch of contributions to their open source codebase.
(I dislike Monsanto's heavy-handed IP enforcement, but the data scientists are pretty far away from that; it's like criticizing Microsoft Research for the Windows OEM bundling concerns. I prefer organic food, but I'm happy that industrial agriculture/the green revolution keeps billions of people from starving.)
It's great news for anybody who wants to use CouchDB, because this means that they're going to run into the problems of big deployments, and that they'll have the money and the motivation to fix it.
Better that Monsanto pays for the big-fixing than me.
(I dislike Monsanto's heavy-handed IP enforcement, but the data scientists are pretty far away from that; it's like criticizing Microsoft Research for the Windows OEM bundling concerns. I prefer organic food, but I'm happy that industrial agriculture/the green revolution keeps billions of people from starving.)