I don’t usually do this kind of post, but following up on my comments in Diverse.NET about the state of OSS in the community I thought it would be worth pointing out that the Lucene.NET project is looking for help. Anecdotally I know that a lot of people use Lucene.NET in London, so I suspect that situation is mirrored in the wider community. A lot of the love for Lucene.NET probably comes from its usage in NHibernate Search. RavenDB uses Lucene.NET internally. Lucene (and related pieces like Solr) are ‘big beasts’ in the search field, must as Hibernate is in the ORM field, and having a working port gives us easy access to this technology in the same way NHibernate gave us a first class ORM. So I think its an important piece of the ecosystem for us to support. For those looking for a little more Scott Cowan gave a presenation on Lucene at Skillsmatter that you can check out here.
It’s probably worth reading through the thread on the mailing list archives to get a feel for the conversation there as to the direction the project is headed particularly this post.