Lucene is maintained by a team of volunteer developers.
Lucene was originally written in Doug's spare time during late 1997 and early 1998. Doug had previously written search engines at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Apple, and Excite@Home, and authored several information retrieval papers and patents.
Currently Doug splits his time between Lucene and Nutch, and is also available for limited contract work.