Apache better than GPL for open-source business?

Matt Asay explores an idea that has crossed my mind more than once – the Apache license is pretty nice.

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Got data? You can build your own Solr-powered Search Engine!

Thursday, 30 April 2009
11:00 to 12:00

We invite you to a webinar featuring Erik Hatcher, Lucene/Solr Committer and co-author of Lucene In Action. Erik will show you how you can build a search engine from scratch using Solr, the Lucene Open Source Search Engine.Take in a variety data sources, and end up with a usable web interface all in a matter of minutes! Data sources will include a relational database, column separated (such as a spreadsheet) data,…

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Lucene, Open Source and the Cost of Experimentation

I was at a company a while back that was considering replacing a commercial vendor with a Lucene/Solr based solution.  At this company, they paid a good chunk of money for the commercial solution and we were discussing the (de)merits of the system.  Way back when, their primary purchase motivation was they wanted a “shrink wrap” product with the peace of mind of a company behind the product (they bought their system pre-Lucid) and…

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Real-time Search With Lucene

Real-time search is kind of a fuzzy concept, but basically it means dropping the time a modification to an index takes to be seen by users to a near negligible quantity – or a small enough time difference to be acceptable for a given real-time application. Not all applications need real-time search, but the type of application that does need it is very popular these days – social networking sites. The average social networking site…

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Apache Mahout 0.1 Released

I’m pleased to announce the first release of the Apache Mahout project.  Apache Mahout is a suite of machine learning algorithm implementations.  Here’s the release notice I just sent to various mailing lists:

The Apache Lucene project is pleased to announce the release of Apache Mahout 0.1.
Apache Mahout is a subproject of Apache Lucene with the goal of delivering scalable
machine learning algorithm implementations under the Apache license.  The first public

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ApacheCon Europe Follow Up

Another year, another successful ApacheCon Europe, at least as far as Lucene, Solr and I are concerned.  This year, like last, Erik Hatcher and I had trainings on Lucene and Solr.  Both were well attended, despite the economy, showing once again the power of open source and the fact that people are still invested in search.  (If you missed the training, see here for alternatives.)

During the conference, there were several talks on…

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