Dave, I appreciate the motivation, but this is not how it works. Any ASF release needs to be voted upon. Normally, this would be done by the project's PMC. For a project under incubation, it would be voted upon by the PPMC (which includes the Incubator PMC).
Please see http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html#Releases%0D for information on releases while in the Incubator. --- Noel
