Folks, Apache Hadoop has come a long way since our humble beginnings. As a community we've made significant progress, even in 2011 - we've had 3 releases off the branch-0.20-security (0.20.205 being the latest) and we just released 0.23.0 last week, our first major release off trunk in a while.
With hadoop-0.20.205 we finally have an Apache release with both security and HBase support, both critical for the growing ecosystem. With that, I think it's time to call it as hadoop-1.0. The 1.0 moniker has something we've wanted for a while and I think it's time for us to just ship it. Linus did something similar with GNU/Linux 3.0. Yes, we could add more features or better it along many dimensions (ala hadoop-0.23), but right now we have a pretty decent piece of software i.e. the feature set in hadoop-0.20.205 is compelling and widely used. We could call hadoop-0.23 (or 0.22) as 2.0 etc. I do think we, as a community, can support compatibility in the hadoop-1.x series, which is the essential ingredient. This isn't a brand new idea, Doug suggested this a long while ago. Thoughts? thanks, Arun