UPDATE: There is a follow-up, which explains what happened in the community after this post: What happened to Lucene.Net? It got forked

Lucene.Net, the .NET version of the famous Lucene search engine, is in a pretty critical stage. The short version is that Apache Software Foundation is considering killing the project because the community behind Lucene.Net is not active enough and since the project graduated from the incubator to a real project on its own, no “official” releases have been made (only source releases) and the site is not compliant to the “branding” guidelines.

For the long version, please read the mail sent out to the Lucene.Net mailing list, Lucene.NET Community Status and the heated discussion that came out from this email: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/lucene-lucene-net-user/201010.mbox/browser.

Lucene.Net is a pretty widely use full-text search library: it is used by many opensource project like Umbraco, Orchard, NHibernate.Search, Subtext and even RavenDB is using Lucene.Net as foundations for the querying side of the product. And it’s is also used by lots of software agencies and consulting companies to build the solutions they sell to their customers.

Since none of the committers have a blog (or at least, not that I know of), since I’m a fan of Lucene.Net, with this post I wanted to raise the awareness about this problem and asking for your help.

If you are using Lucene.Net in your solutions or in your opensource project, consider spending some time helping out with Lucene.Net. Or even better, if you are working in a company that is selling solutions based on Lucene.Net, “ask your boss if you can get paid to help out - then put it on the company blog”. No, starting a money raising page will not help.

If no new people comes to help, the project will put back in the Apache Incubator and a new proposal has to be made and voted, or the project will be put in the Attic and then if someone want, a fork can be created (unfortunately the name has to be changed since Apache owns the name Lucene.Net).

So, if you want to help keeping Lucene.Net alive, please step up now, join the mailing list, and state your intentions over there.