[Xapian-discuss] How to beat Google aka Xapian & Natural Language Processing.

[James Aylett]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 11:02:08AM -0700, Kevin Duraj wrote:

> But I am puzzled about something. What make you think that any
> corporation can compete with open source and not fail in time? Or
> what make you think that any corporation can hire more programmers
> then open source community?

The second question isn't really the right one. I think you actually
mean:

   What makes you think that any corporation can attract more
   *motivated* programmers *with suitable skills* than the open source
   community can attract?

I think the jury's out on this. Sometimes the open source community
seems to win, sometimes corporations. I'd say that corporations have
the edge in extreme niche markets (there isn't an open source speech
recogniser that comes to the level of the commercial ones, for
instance), but this may change over time.

The open source community is generally much, much smaller than the
corpus of available developers, in any given society (at the
moment). I suspect that most specialists would rather work
commercially in their specialism than work in something else and hack
on their specialism by night; there *are* ways of being paid for open
source work, but they are either more hassle (eg contracting), or rare
(eg working for someone IBM, Sun or RedHat on open source projects).

Incidentally, I and a GNU developer spent some time in 1998 arguing
with a commercial developer that his company would disappear under the
rolling stone of apache. We were wrong: that company was Zeus, and
they adapted to the changing environment; they now make one of the
nicest layer 7 load balancers. In the long term, maybe someone will
beat Zeus, NetScalar, CISCO and the rest... we'll have to see.

J

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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org