Some of you might have heard of KinoSearch, a Perl search engine with a fast C/XS core, inspired by Lucene.
The KinoSearch contributors have then expanded in focus, implementing more functionality in C and enabling bindings to other programming languages. Still the Perl bindings are the most complete and usables ones. The result is Lucy, an Apache incubator project.
Although the news hasn't made the front page of apache.org yet, Lucy has been approved as a full Apache project. This means that all license issues have been resolved, and that the developer pool is considered sufficiently large and thriving.
I'd like to congratulate the Lucy developers to this important mileston. Everybody who needs a search engine should take a closer look at Lucy, it is fast and very well useable. I look forward to updating one of my own projects from KinoSearch to Lucy.