I don't know anything for sure, but it appears that cloudant themselves posted the link to the press release on Hacker News, which seems like a pretty good indication that they are the ones trying to publicize this, which then points to the latter of your two choices being likely.

Whether this is due to lack of realizing how poorly Monsanto is viewed by most, or whether they thought the somewhat Rand-ian slant of HN' would offset that, I don't know.