Hi Grant, 

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

While I have developed extensively against Lucene.net, I do not possess the 
java skills needed to do a port of the code... So, while I wouldn't mind being 
a committer, I do not think I am qualified. (I guess if I was, I could just use 
Lucene proper and that would be that)

As to other duties of a committer, I think the ASF is perceived as a black box 
of questions for most of us.

For one, I don't think anyone outside the 4 committers even understand *why* it 
is a good thing to be on the ASF vs. CodePlex, Sourceforge, etc.  Maybe if 
there was an understanding of the why, the requirements of the ASF would make 
more sense.  I think a lot of us right now just perceive the ASF as the group 
that is wanting to kill Lucene.net.

I get your comments about the slower than slow development, but that is also 
somewhat of a sign that it works.  While 2.9.2 may be behind, it seems very 
stable with very few issues.  If we send the project to the attic, how will 
anyone be able to submit bugfixes ever?  Frankly, I use 2.9.2 every day and 
have not found bugs in the areas that I use... but I'm sure they are in there 
somewhere.

As for the name, I thought Lucene.net was the name of the project back in the 
SourceForge days... 
So my question is based on the premise that "if the lucene.net name was brought 
*to* ASF, why can the community not leave with it?"

Maybe my memory is wrong and that wasn't the name when it was on SourceForge.

Ultimately, this is an important project to very many users, regardless of the 
devs... I would be interested in participating to keep the user community going.

Thanks.
Heath

-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Ingersoll [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2010 8:16 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Vote thread started on [email protected]


On Dec 29, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Heath Aldrich wrote:

> Perhaps I'm the only one, but I really don't see the logic going on here.
> 
> If you know there is a dedicated group of Lucene.net users, then how can you 
> claim that the project is stagnant?

The PMC asked the community to step up and remedy 4 issues in October, several 
of which were quite simple to fix.  Not one of them was done.  There hasn't 
been a commit since July of 2010.  While yes, there is a User community (and 
I'm happy to discuss ways we can help them), there is not a development 
community.

> There are active questions on the list, etc and there is help commonly 
> offered through the mailing lists.
> From time to time as the need arises, the lucene.net is updated (yes I know 
> it may be years between updates)... why is that necessarily bad?
> 
> Further, if Apache doesn't want to continue to host development in its 
> current state, why hang on to the name instead of releasing it where it can 
> back to SourceForge, or codeplex or somewhere else?  Why the iron fist 
> regarding the name?  Has the Apache foundation provided some investment to 
> the Lucene.net name that they need to protect?  

IANAL, but the ASF owns the Lucene trademark and if we let it go, then it 
dilutes the protection of that name, AIUI.

> I understand if they don't want to host a slowly developing product, but the 
> name issue has me totally confused.

I don't think your characterization of slow moving is accurate.  Releases to 
date have not been up to ASF standards, there has been zero commits in 6 months 
(You can't tell me there aren't bugs or patches that need to be applied) and 
all the committers are basically gone from the community.  That is not slow 
developing, that is a coma.  I do agree, however, that there are users of 
Lucene.NET out there.  I am happy to help find them a home and even happy to 
see Lucene.NET stay at the ASF (and will help that happen), but it requires at 
least 4 people to step up and say they will be committers on a new Incubator 
project.  Are you volunteering?

-Grant

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