this is great! I'll definitly hit the donation button myself in near future, but don't expect much since I'm a little away from having a job that really pays out right now.
Anyway: Your plans for the future sound *very* interesting. I've been using lucene quite some time ago for the one and only persistence layer in a project and it did work out. An optimized ferret for these kinds of things would definitly be great. IMHO people - including myself - often have a sql layer in the back office mainly because of security reasons.. relational dbms are so long around and often you are relying on things simply because they have proven to work. On the other hand performance sensible apps, gameservers or telco servers with many concurrent users often can't rely on rdbms out of performance reasons. So this sounds really interesting from a practical point of view as well. Hopefully such companies will make a noticeable donation once they are aware that something like ferret exists and has future plans like the ones you've described. Being noticed seems to be very important, imho it needs a marketing genius like DHH to give an open source project an breakthrough like the one that rails has seen.
Regarding the 'I need something on the table to eat' imho the best thing that could happen to an open source developer who loves his child project is that one of the big companys hires him and lets him work on what he loves. Seems as this has just happened to Charles Nutter et al who have been hired from sun because of their work on jruby. On the other hand many developers don't want to work for a big company because of the loss of freedom. Whatever you decide to do in the future there really should be some great opportunities (and donations) for an incredible developer who is pushing forward a project of the size of ferret in such a great pace.
My personal opinion: If one is making money with the help of an open source project like ferret and there is an opportunity to donate, they should feel a need to give something back. May it be patches or money...
Cheers,
Jan
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