bigizzy - Slashdot User

Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces? 65

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @04:22PM from the you'll-have-this-ansi-terminal-and-like-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that manages an online database for the political market. We add to this DB daily with updates from a variety of sources and our customers then search through this content via our Solr/Lucene search engine. My problem is, our search interface is a little, well, basic and I would love to know if there are any feature-rich open source alternatives out there. The only one I can find is Flamenco, and while that seems strong on categorisation, that seems to be about the height of it."

Comment False Impression (Score 1) 155

by bigizzy on Sunday June 14, 2009 @12:12PM (#28326963) Attached to: SAP — Open Source Friend Or Foe ?

The article states that "If it wants to be a serious, respected player in the world of open source, as befits its size, it must do better."; -

What makes anyone think that SAP would care about being respected in the open source world? They are a large business and the stakeholders that they are rightfully interested in (like every other large business) are

1. Their Investors/Shareholders
2. Their customers
3. Their employees.

SAP uses Open Source where appropriate (as they should) to enhance shareholder value or customer value or for that matter employee value.

The real question should be "If the open source world wants to be a serious, respected entity in the world of business (the real world) then IT MUST DO BETTER. The Open Source World needs to demonstrate and evangelize models and mechanisms for monetizing the investment that business's make into Open Source. While this exists today, the focus on this is very limited with greater emphasis on "Open Source Purity" verses "Business Value through Open Source"

SAP — Open Source Friend Or Foe ? 155

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 12, 2009 @02:44PM from the beer-more-than-speech dept.

pavithran writes "Does SAP, one of the largest business companies offering software solutions, support FOSS as a movement? Why is SAP looking at closed and open source in a similar way? This shows lot of ambiguity in SAP's attitude towards open source software. I found an interesting article in Linux Journal on whether SAP is an open source friend or foe, by Glyn Moody. Here's a quote from the article: 'For an outfit that calls itself "the world's largest business software company," the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world. With 51,500 employees, a turnover of 11.5 billion euros ($16 billion) last year, and operating profits of 2.7 billion euros ($3.8 billion), SAP is clearly one of the heavyweights in the computer world. Given that huge clout, SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend or its foe. ... A company that wished open source well would back these ideas. One that really supported free software would also fight against software patents. So, while SAP's involvement in Eclipse and investment in open source companies is welcome — and pretty self-interested, it has to be said, given that it presumably hopes to make a profit on them — it's not really enough cancel out its unhelpful attitude and statements elsewhere. If it wants to be a serious, respected player in the world of open source, as befits its size, it must do better.'"

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