Relating to softwares, I think there are two types of people: on one side there are the users , that want some funcionalities from them and support those softwares by using them and, sometimes, with some comments or sugestions. On the other side we have the programmers, many of them very happy in developping things that can be useful, or not quite so, for some main tasks, defined as the basis of project.
In the case o Nutch, it seems to me that in the very begining of the project there was a clear vision of the mission: to have an open source, powerful search engine. But with open source projects, sometimes there is on the developers side, a lack, or a deviation of the real focus and the people, even if they follow some pattern, sometimes, don't go strictly after the real objectives, established at the start of the project. Today, with all those Tika, Solr, etc, it all became quite complicate for me and other non-programmer people and it seems that the original aim was lost, and Nutch is being used as a basis or as an excuse for a lot of programming ventures, no matter how worthwhile they can be. But I think that the real pedestrian users, those who use local instalations of Nutch, vertical search engines, with about some hundred of thousands of indexed pages, the people who really support the efforts to make Nutch run, were forgotten on the road followed nowadays. I think that Nutch should have been, allways, a primary project and other projects should have been considered as add-ons to some particular, special needs. Today it seems quite the oposite. Just look at the mailing list and see how many questions are asked about Solr. I am, really, very sad with the latest version, where Nutch was delegated to just crawling functions. I can't find an alternative to set up a real production search engine, without any suitable web search interface that can be of any use to the general audience. I really miss the searching function of Nutch with all those nice features and easy of customization and it seems, to me, that the original reason for building Nutch was defeated. For my purposes - a real web search engine- the situation as it is in this version 1.3, led me to think that Nutch is becoming a very handicapped project. I was proud to use the logo “Powered by Nutch”. Now, I am afraid that I will end up with a Google Custom Engine.
