Lucene/Solr Progress Reported
July 8, 2011
We have been immersed in commercial search and content processing for several months. We were delighted to learn from H Open that “Apache Lucene/Solr 3.3 Released.” This comes on the heels of the 3.2 release just a month ago. We’re semi- excited; the list of enhancements is solid, but we still have found some grousing about complexity, performance, and faceting.
On a related note, we were concerned as we read InfoWorld’s “No Need to Worry as Open Source Contributions Decline.” Apparently, open source has been discovered by organizations who want the developers but don’t want the community. We also have a hypothesis that the recent spike in patent related matters among very large companies signals the beginning of intellectual property wars. Open source may find itself marginalized as organizations rush to patent or acquire patents in the event of a major dispute.
Writer Savio Rodrigues insists that the reduction in open source benefactors is no cause for alarm:
“Over time, user contribution declines, but the project is sustained by the funds made available through corporate purchasers of the product. In a sense, as projects mature, user contribution of time is inversely proportional to customer contribution of money.”
Our take? The contribution of money won’t help projects such as Lucene/Solr if the small cadre of experts who work on quite specific open source projects go to work for a commercial company. Open source may become more of a marketing angle than a way to escape from the clutches of vendors who market proprietary software.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published by Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
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