Personally, I feel that this merge is a good thing for both Lucene and Solr:
- Solr users get the latest Lucene improvements faster and releases get streamlined.
- Lucene users get access to Solr features such as faceting.
- The in-sync trunk allows new features to make their way into the right place (Lucene vs Solr) more easily and duplication is minimized.
- Bugs are caught earlier by the huge combined test suite.
- More number of committers means more ideas and hands available to the projects
- Other Lucene based projects can benefit too because many Solr features will be made available through Java APIs.
There are a couple of things to be worked out. For example, we need to decide where the integrated sources should live and whether or not to sync Solr’s version with Lucene’s. All this will take some time but I am confident that our combined community will manage the transition well.
What’s a good news. Solr have been provided Enterprise Level support by lucidimagination.com. Big corporates using Solr: AOL, Comcast Interactive Media, IBM, Netflix, LinkedIn and MySpace. I believe that the future of Solr is bright.