Thursday, September 09, 2004

An acquaintance of mine is starting a "small open source software company" called MindOwl. His goal appears to be to foster the development of new open source search technologies for web searching, desktop searching, etc... The thing that seems to distinguish his projects from others like Nutch and Lucene is that the projects are attempting to aggregate search functionality accross the web, local desktops and local network resources. This is a great goal to have, and even if it doesn't end up being a profitable business. The real potential for these projects will be to offer an alternative (and potential competitor) to the aggregated search services expected from Microsoft and Google. Another item of interest that I see at the MindOwl site are the stated Production Requirements. While the last item is obviously self serving on the part of the new company (and why shouldn't it be?), the first four requirements are something all developers should consider before declaring that their software is at a production status or is ready to ship. They're pretty straight forward: completed specifications; a test suite that can produce repeatable results; completed documentation; and a defined and automated build (or distrubution) process.