An minor issue with the forking discussion occurred to me this morning that may have been overlooked in the noise since the discussions so far have been centered around technology and project management issues:
We know that quite a number of companies are using Lucene.Net in commercial products which is of course perfectly legitimate. Some questions have been raised about the value added by ASF and specifically the Lucene.Net name. Therefore my point to reflect on is this: does your company use the Lucene name in any way as part of your product marketing to lend credibility to the underlying technology? If so, you might want to ask your marketing department/person about how it would affect your company if the underlying technology was no longer Lucene but instead a no-name OSS search engine. As developers we sometimes forget about business issues such as the value of marketing by association and I want to make sure it doesn't bite anyone in the rear as we explore various options. (http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/PoweredBy) Cheers, Ben
