I think it's also important to add-- writing a "driver" for Couch is, basically, writing an API that essentially calls some HTTP library with some options set, and then parses the resulting JSON data.

For example-- Ektorp, one of the more popular Java libraries? Wraps the Apache HttpClient, and uses the Jackson library to parse JSON. CouchDB4J does something similar, only it uses JSON-lib. A good Java coder could probably write their own fully-functional driver in a day.

jquery.couch.js is basically just a wrapper to $.ajax().

node-couchdb uses the built in client library for node. A good node coder could probably write a fully-functional driver in an hour.

So I don't think it's a matter of "download the official driver" as much as it is "download your platform's preferred JSON parser".