Grant,
I'm originator of this thread and PostgreSQL is also a big user of the
Snowball project, so we also are very interested in the vital
activity of the project. However, I see issue with license, which is
currently BSD and this allows us to use snowball in PostgreSQL (which
is also BSD licensed). Is't possible to preserve BSD license under
Apache Software Foundation ?
Another question is not about snowball compiler, but about specific
stemmers, which contributed by people. Are you willing also to
support this activity ?
I'm crossposting also to the -hackers discussion list of the PostgreSQL
project.
Oleg
On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
Forwarding a private message I sent to Dr. Porter to the list as a whole as a
possible way of addressing Dr. Porter's desire to code less and also the
desire for releases, etc. Dr. Porter's response was that I should bring it
up within the community to gauge other's interest, so here it is:
<snip>
Hi Dr. Porter,
My name is Grant Ingersoll and I am a committer on the Apache Lucene project
(http://lucene.apache.org), which is a big user of the Snowball code. In
reading this message and hearing of your desire not to code anymore, it
occurred to me that maybe the Snowball project would be interested in
becoming a part of the Apache Software Foundation, whereby it can get
attention from a community of developers/committers. For instance, just the
other day, I was thinking about a performance improvement that we could use
in Lucene land that would allow passing in a char [] array instead of a
String to the stemmer, since all of our Token objects are represented that
way and it now forces us to construct a new String every time.
If you're interested, let me know and we can figure out where to go from
here. The donation process for projects outside of the ASF is pretty easy
and I would propose that it become a sub-project of the Lucene project, so
you can know it will be in good hands. Naturally, you and Richard would also
be committers on the project, so you could still be involved as much as you
like.
At any rate, thanks for the great piece of software.
Cheers,
Grant Ingersoll
</snip>
So, what do others think about donating the Snowball stemmers to the ASF and
in particular the Lucene project? Snowball would likely be a subproject of
Lucene (like Solr, Mahout, etc.) and people could contribute patches, become
committers, etc. just as any other ASF project, i.e. based on merit.
-Grant
On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Martin Porter wrote:
Oleg,
Hello, nice to hear from you you again, after so long. Richard and I have
discussed the idea of having a proper release policy from time to time, but
have never managed to put one in place. I think that is acceptable, since
snowball changes less and less as the years go by. (I am 65 now, and want
to
withdraw from software work in the future.)
As well as the snowball compiler, I have no plans to alter the stemmers
themselves (except perhaps the English stemmer -- I have thought of undoing
or modifying an earlier extension.) The version we're currently releasing
is
just as stable as the one you used in 2007, and probably little different.
Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: o...@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83
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