As was to be expected Microsoft have decided to discontinue sale of FAST on non Windows platforms. Hardly a surprise really. But I’m so glad Microsoft decided last May they could no longer “afford” having HURIDOCS as a customer for http://www.hurisearch.org. We very quickly switched to Apache Lucene, Solr and are very happy with the result. Performance is good, and we have cut hosting costs by a staggering 400%. The guys managing the crawler are happy as they now have full control of adding removing sites.
Next step for Microsoft I fear will be to stop FAST as an independent product only bundling it with other packages, Sharepoint in particular.
I think this move will boost open source search initiatives. Why would anyone want to invest in expensive vendor licenses when they have no guarantee whatsoever that the product they build their search systems on will survive an acquisition. We all remember Verity and we’ll all remember FAST.
I must spend some time researching semantic web applications built on Solr to see if we can drop a Jena layer over hurisearch.
Microsoft FAST vs. Apache Solr – Meyer Information Management Blog | 09-Feb-10 at 3:18 am | Permalink
[...] Bereits letzten Donnerstag konnte man dem Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog entnehmen, dass man in Zukunft den Support von Linux und Unix einstellen wird. Neben dem Konkurrenten Autonomy dominiert FAST nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Interoperabilität zu Win Dateisystemen und Formaten sowie Sharepoint den hiesigen Markt. Das FAST-Bestandskunden diese Meldung bereits aufgegriffen haben und die offene Alternative Apache Lucene/Solr durchaus ernst genommen wird, zeigt dieser Blog-Post. [...]