From the 'everything worthwhile needs commercial support' files:

InternetNews.com has learned that Lucid Imagination, a new venture to provide commercial support and services for the open source Apache Lucene text search engine is ramping up with an official launch on January 26, 2009.

Apache Lucene is a critical Apache project used by many to integrate search features into their applications.

Key Lucene contributors Grant Ingersoll, Erik Hatcher, and Yonik Seeley are also part of Lucid Imagination and are likely to provide the link between the commercial side of the company and the Lucene community. Lucid Imagination is also expected to build a commercial version of Lucene that will be back wit support and services.

This is a great thing for Lucene and can only help to further its development and increase adoption. My only concern is that Lucid Imagination not fork Lucene with a significant amount of proprietary development that doesn't end back in the mainstream Lucene release.