Grant’s Grunts: Lucene Edition

In case you missed the announcement, Lucid Imagination has joined a new open source advocacy group called OSA – Open Source for America.

While it is obvious that having the government use more open source would benefit me from a company standpoint, I think there are many other reasons to support such an effort.  First and foremost, I have seen the countless times Lucene and Solr have saved real companies/organizations real dollars.  As a taxpayer, having the government save real money is a real good thing.

Second, I’ve often met with people in the government who often cite the “we’d love to use Open Source Project X, but there is no commercial support for it.”  If done correctly, an advocacy group should be able to help by either (or both):

1. Getting people over that fear.  People writing open source are often the same people writing other code on other commercial programs (sometimes in different domains, sometimes not).  I’ve been a professional programmer for a good long time now, as are most of the people involved with Lucene and Solr, many who have written their own search engines before.  Don’t give into the fear!  Come, join us in the open.  The water is fine.
2. If they still can’t get over that fear, help them find people and companies who can assist them.  Most major open source projects have at least one company ready to assist, if not multiple companies and a whole plethora of consultants.  In other words, help is available.

From a Apache Lucene/Solr standpoint, more users equals more ideas from more places, which results in bigger/better/faster Lucene/Solr.  Having done a fair amount of gov’t contracting in my past (FAA, DOD, DOJ, etc.) I know firsthand about the kinds of problems these organizations face in dealing with large amounts of structured and unstructured data.  These are perfect places for Lucene, Solr, Mahout, etc. to step in and help the government better utilize their data and our tax dollars.  It’s already happening in a lot of places within the gov’t, so it seems only logical to push it in more places.

Finally, (cue “God Bless America” and videos of Old Glory) the words “Open” and “Government”  just seem to ring true to me as a citizen.  Too often, us little guys feel left out.  A part of me really likes the thought that code I wrote is helping big Ol’ Uncle Sam work just a little bit better and, just maybe, perhaps a little more transparently where possible.