Hi Per, if you are evaluating with your ProductOwner whether he/she wants to contribute back: Try to not see it only as a gift to the community for a highly usefull product, but also see it as a protection of your investment.
What you are going to customize will be deeply integrated in Solr - in code where changes might occur more often than in others, since they are critical to Solr's overall performance. When you are contributing back and committers rate your contribution as valuable and safe enough to commit it to the trunk, almost every enhancement of those code-regions is likely to be compatible with your changes. This highly reduces maintenance-costs, while it leaves more ressources for new innovations and features that make your product great. Kind regards, Em > We might make it > "outside" Solr/Lucene but I hope to be able to convince my ProductOwner > to make it as a Solr-feature contributing it back - especiallly if the > Solr community agrees that it would be a nice and commonly usable > feature. Believe it is a commonly usable feature - especially "when > using Solr as a NoSQL data store and not just a search index" (as > http://wiki.apache.org/solr/RealTimeGet says)
