[Search-l] Thoughts on the "Bazaar Development Model"

[Aerik Sylvan]

Hi Everyone,

In watching this list, and reading some of the stuff posted at
search.wikia.com, I am struck by the thought that this is an interesting
experiment in a pure bazaar development model (as in "The cathedral and the
bazaar" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar>).  But
unless we're doing that for it's own sake, I wonder if that's the best way
to go for this endeavor.

We've had a few people come and strongly promote some ideas, and we've also
had statements of targeted existing technologies (Lucene and Nutch) from
Jimmy, but I think we've not had anything even approaching consensus or a
real plan to get there.  Frankly, I wonder if we've actually got the
attention of the people who could actually do the work (I don't know Java
and don't have the time to learn it right now, so I'm not going to be much
help for a lot of actual code writing - much as I'd love to work on making
this a reality).  Also, at the risk of sounding quite negative, this is (at
least it sounds like) a for-profit venture that doesn't have nearly the
"make the world a better place" appeal of wikipedia - so I don't know that
we'll attract developers the same as wikipedia.

So, I'm writing about all this in the interests of discussion.  There have
been some posts asking "what are we gonna do?" but I think the important
discussion to keep going is "this is what I think we should do".  If we're
going to develop this using a pure bazaar model, we've gotta start by
getting interested parties (all of us) to hammer out the beginnings of a
spec.  We've got something like a very rough, high level outline of this,
but I think we've stalled out.  Finally, and very importantly, is there
anyone on the list who is actually capable of setting up a Nutch/Lucene
search engine?  Are you willing to devote some time to doing it?

BTW - in regards to my last post (the poll from dice.com), I'm a big fan of
this project as well, even if I have a bunch of concerns about it ever
actually getting off the ground.

Aerik
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