I was doing some research today on using the acts_as_ferret plugin for an upcoming Bust Out site, when I quite accidentally stumbled upon this interesting post regarding how terrible and misleading the plugin apparently is. The tone certainly seems disproportionate to the offense. And I’m no enterprise search architect, but I understand that distributing an index when running in a cluster is a fairly common architectural approach. I sure wouldn’t want to buy this guy a free meal he didn’t like.

I don’t mean to pick out this post in particular, especially as the blog advertises itself as some sort of open source debunking machine. I also don’t mean to oversimplify the (non)-validity of critical postings, as constructive criticism and community policing are both valid reasons for (negative) open exchanges. However, the frequency with which I see fairly narrow, one-sided rants about freely provided software - free to use, free to make all sorts of modifications to and likewise free to ignore, is disconcerting. It seems few things are free these days.

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