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!

3 Comments

  • 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.

  • 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

  • This is weird because I viewed SourceForge.NET last night and there was a new release of Lucene.NET in two different projects?

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