Lucene.NET Project Status

[Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>]

Hi .Netters,

The Lucene PMC would like to ask everyone involved with .NET if they might chime in on the status of this project.  There hasn't been a commit since July 2010 (and that one was trivial and there were only 2 in June) and there seems to be very little activity on the dev mailing list.  There also has not been a release in a long time.  This was brought up at the last Lucene Board Report and it doesn't appear that there has been any action since.   A community should be able to withstand the loss of a single committer, but here it appears that there are no longer any committers willing to work on the project.

In order to remedy the situation, we would like the following things to be done:
1.  The community needs to show some (sustained) life.  Not just in code, but in discussion of the project's future, etc.  We would expect the committers to take a leadership role here.
2. The community needs to do a real release that is voted on by the PMC.
3. The webpage needs to be updated to reflect that those previous "source" releases are not real releases and should be taken down.  Likewise, the news section should not tout these non-releases as releases.  The website should also meet the PMC Branding guidelines recently sent out.
4. Identify some new blood for contributors/committers.  Or the current committers need to step up more and take a lead role in the community.

We would like to see action on all of these things by the end of this year.  If they can't be met, there will be one of the following actions:
1. Go back into Incubation
2. Go into the Apache Attic.  If someone wants to take the code base and fork it out as a project somewhere else under a new name that does not use the Lucene trademark name (since that is owned by the ASF) than that is perfectly acceptable under the Apache license.  

If the conditions can be met, we think that the project should spin itself out as its own Top Level ASF project with its own PMC so that its future direction can be set by the stakeholders of the project and not by the larger Lucene project as a whole.

Sincerely,
Grant Ingersoll
On behalf of the Lucene PMC