Powers
smart search and indexing solutions for AOL, Apple, Comcast, Disney,
IBM, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia, and more.

Forest
Hill, MD – 27 September 2011 –
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers,
stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and
initiatives, today announced the 10th anniversary of Apache Lucene.

The
Lucene information retrieval software was first developed in 1997,
entered the ASF as a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta project in
2001, and became a standalone, Top-Level Project (TLP) in 2005.
Apache Top-Level Projects and their communities demonstrate that they
are well-governed under the Foundation’s meritocratic,
consensus-driven process and principles.

"Ten
years ago, Apache provided Lucene a home where it could build a solid
community. Today we can see the fruit of that community, both through
the wide breadth of Lucene-based applications deployed, and through
the depth of improvements to Lucene made in the past decade,"
said Doug Cutting, ASF Chairman and original Lucene creator.

Apache
Lucene powers smart search and indexing for eCommerce, financial
services, business intelligence, travel, social networking,
libraries, publishing, government, and defense solutions.

"Lucene
has changed the world by opening doors that didn't exist before it
arrived on the Open Source scene,” said ASF Member and Apache
Lucene Committer Erik Hatcher. “Lucene has massively disrupted the
enterprise/proprietary search market, with wide adoption around the
globe in every industry.”

Highly
performant, Apache Lucene is in use across an array of applications,
from mobile to Internet scale, and powers enterprise-grade search
solutions for AOL, Apple, IBM (including its artificial
intelligence-driven supercomputer Watson), LinkedIn, Netflix,
Wikipedia, Zappos, and many other global organizations.

"When
it arrived to ASF, Lucene immediately made a huge impact --Lucene was
one of those technologies that made a whole generation of businesses
possible-- it was fast, easy to use, free, and had a growing
community of users and developers. Apache Lucene can be found in an
amazing number of products and services we all know and use, as well
as in products and services we have never heard of,” said ASF
Member and Apache Lucene Committer Otis Gospodnetic.

"While
it's been six years since I joined the Lucene community, the last two
were certainly the most exciting,” said Simon Willnauer, Vice
President of Apache Lucene.

Current
Apache Lucene sub-projects are PyLucene and Open Relevance; other
sub-projects, including Droids, Lucene.Net, and Lucy, have spun out
of the project and are undergoing further development in the Apache
Incubator with the intention of becoming standalone TLPs. Solr, the
high-speed Open Source enterprise search platform, has merged into
the Lucene project itself, whilst former Lucene sub-projects Hadoop,
Mahout, Nutch, and Tika have all successfully graduated as autonomous
Apache Hadoop, Apache Mahout, Apache Nutch, and Apache Tika TLPs.

Originally
written in Java, Apache Lucene is available in many programming
languages such as Perl, C#, C++, PHP, Python, and Ruby. “Now, 10
years later, Apache Lucene is backed by a large community of users,
contributors and developers with incredible energy poured into Lucene
every hour of every day of the year," said Gospodnetic, who is
also co-author of Lucene in Action, and founder of Sematext
International.

“Even
after 10 years, it seems this blazing community and codebase hasn't
reached its potential yet,” added Willnauer. “I'm proud to be
part of this community and look forward to another decade of Open
Source Search."

Hatcher,
who is also co-author of Lucene in Action and co-founder of Lucid
Imagination, added, “if you need search (and you do!), Lucene is
the best core technology choice."

Hatcher,
Willnauer, and other members of the Apache Lucene community will be
presenting sessions on data handling and analytics –a.k.a. “Lucene
and Friends”-- including what's upcoming in Apache Lucene 4.0 (with
performance improvements up to 20,000% from previous versions and
more) at ApacheCon, 7-11 November 2011, in Vancouver, Canada. To
register, visit http://apachecon.com/

Availability
and Oversight

Apache
Lucene software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is
overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the
project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s
day-to-day operations, including community development and product
releases. Apache Lucene source code, documentation, mailing lists,
and related resources are available at http://lucene.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established
in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred
fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --
the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's
meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than
350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate
to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting
millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are
distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively
participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and
ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and
expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by
individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis
Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, HP, Hortonworks, IBM, Matt
Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For
more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

"Apache"
and “Apache Lucene” are trademarks of The Apache Software
Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.

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