Given how long Lucene has existed as an open source project, why form this company now?
Lucene has achieved its incredible popularity and level of adoption because it is open source and because of the strengths of the technology. These strengths include its flexibility, out-of-the-box relevancy ranking, query performance and scalability. Both Lucene and Solr are quite robust and ready for the enterprise in a lot of ways, but need that extra push and support a commercial company can bring to bear not only to make the software easier to deploy, but also to enrich the community. However, like many other open source technologies, Lucene/Solr inherit some of the challenges common to open source software such as lack of guaranteed support or bug fixes, no formal quality control (the users are the testers), lack of formal support for upgrades, access to organized training and education for search application developers. Lucid Imagination intends to further strengthen the Lucene/Solr open source technology by addressing the above challenges by providing commercial-grade support,
