Foreword

Lucene started as a self-serving project. In late 1997, my job uncertain, I sought something of my own to market. Java was the hot new programming language, and I needed an excuse to learn it. I already knew how to write search software, and thought I might fill a niche by writing search software in Java. So I wrote Lucene.

In 2000, I realized that I didn’t like to market stuff. I had no interest in negotiating licenses and contracts, and I didn’t want to hire people and build a company. I liked writing software, not selling it. So I tossed Lucene up on SourceForge, to see if open source might let me keep doing what I liked.

A few folks started using Lucene right away. In 2001, folks at Apache offered to adopt Lucene. The number of ...

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