A little wider perspective on where the renaming takes us and why it is happening. My opinion.
Last year around this same time the Hadoop project was on the verge of splitting. We had three "commercial" versions of Hadoop competing to be the "real" Hadoop, while the officially released Apache version was outdated. ASF did [amazingly] good job fencing off the claims for external ownership of the Hadoop name, which effectively stopped the split the way it was evolving. The danger of the External Project Split has passed: now the others can call their stuff XYZ-DH7 and be done with it. This fall a danger of Internal Project Split has emerged, because three versions were brewing independently. I call it a danger because more versions of Hadoop means splitting and spreading resources of the community including the (rapidly growing) software stack above. It also means stronger story for competing technologies. Which could be good, or bad, or both. The question is why does the project fall into Splitting danger every fall. My answer is it's the "Forever-20" syndrome. In the last several years there was always a "reason" to continue with 0.20. Mostly because businesses need to commit to a version for the next year in fall. This is irrelevant to an open source project development and contradicts its natural straight forward motion. As many of you, last week I have been at Hadoop World and ApacheCon and saw a lot (I mean thousands) of people, enthusiastic about the technology, but majorly confused about the versions. My concern is that the rename of 0.20.205 to 1.0 means the community will be stuck with it even longer, leading to the "Occupy Hadoop" movement camping in the Apache Extras park. I would have expected the RM of 0.23 advocating to call it 1.0, but it didn't happen. Renaming branches is not a big deal. The problem is that there is no a consolidating version on the horizon. I'll be glad to be wrong. --Konstantin
