Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

I was looking at Lucene .NET for a full-text search engine implementation but I was surprised to find out that the Lucene.NET application library is not open source anymore. It has been relaunched as a commercial product called SearchBlackBox. Lucene .NET is the core search technology behind the popular Lookout plugin for Outlook (later bought by Microsoft). Too bad that such a cool technology is not open source anymore. Atleast the developers could have left the last stable release of Lucene .NET under a public license. I'm not sure if there's any other open source search library for .NET in the market.

SearchBlackBox for .NET, is the full-text search engine library for .NET compatible with Lucene.Net and Jakarta Lucene 1.4-final. SearchBlackBox allows you to add full-text searching capabilities to all kind of applications from web site search to enterprise search applications. SearchBlackBox is compatible with .NET 1.x, Mono and Jakarta Lucene.

By the way, just to remind you guys that I've moved my blog to www.nilkanth.com. I may still cross-post once in a while. Have a nice weekend!

Published Saturday, September 25, 2004 8:07 PM by ashben
Filed under: , ,

Comments

Saturday, September 25, 2004 10:31 AM by Scott Galloway

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

Interesting and very surprising. It also sucks, taking an open source product and closing it. Also pretty interesting that someone left a comment on my blog a couple of days ago pointing to this: http://lucenedotnet.wz.cz/ - this contains all the files from the Open Source version. I hope this stuff can be put back into open source, the community needs a free search capability like Lucene. (oh, wonder how the effects .TEXT / Community Server: Blogs, it used (uses?) Lucene.Net)
Saturday, September 25, 2004 11:56 AM by mike lorengo

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

Yes, I was taken aback by this also. I'm wondering if it is possible to for them to remove the files from the Open Sourced version. I have a copy on my hard drive.

29.04.2004 Lucene.Net 1.3-rc3 build 001
- initial release of jakarta lucene 1.3-rc3
for changes: http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/jakarta-lucene/CHANGES.txt?rev=1.58
- fix: DateToString bug
for more info:

This looks to be the same version that is on http://lucenedotnet.wz.cs/
Saturday, September 25, 2004 12:28 PM by Christian Romney

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

I don't believe they can un-license something they have already licensed. While thecode added after the change may not be open-source, I think the code before the change is open in perpetuity.
Saturday, September 25, 2004 12:40 PM by Scott Galloway

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

I was looking at this, looks like the used the Apache Software License (http://lucenedotnet.wz.cz/LICENSE.txt) which is pretty free about this sort of thing...but of course to get on SourceForge it would've have to have met the LGPL (I believe) - which expressly forbids closing source
Saturday, September 25, 2004 8:24 PM by Brian McCallister

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

This has been a subject of some discussion on the lucene-dev mailing list, and possible ways to react are being tossed around.

Short form is that previously released code is still openly licensed. Nothing can be done about that. The developers asked sourceforge to wipe the cvs sources though, so finding the sources will be... interesting.

If you *have* a recent checkout of the sources, please drop a note on lucene-dev. Folks there want to see the .NET port survive and prosper. A serious option would be to bring the .NET version to the ASF as well.

-Brian
Saturday, October 02, 2004 3:00 AM by Simon

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

This is weird because I viewed SourceForge.NET last night and there was a new release of Lucene.NET in two different projects?
Tuesday, October 05, 2004 5:18 AM by Dan

# re: Lucene is now SearchBlackBox

Lucene.NET open source version is now available at http://www.openlucene.net

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required)