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.
Recently Doug has worked on peer-to-peer search at Infrasearch (aquired by Sun's JXTA project) and on web services at Grand Central. Currently he continues to help develop Lucene and is available for contract work.