The acquisition of Powerset by Microsoft was feared by many members of the community (since PSet sponsors HBase by having two near full time devs and we all know MS love for OSS) but it turned out to be not that bad. For example, MS became an Apache Platinum sponsor which seems to imply that they are willing to change their perspective. Also, Jim and Stack (the two devs employed by PSet) cannot commit code since August (though they can support, test, describe how to fix bugs, make releases, etc), which IS bad, but this is only to give some time to the MS lawyers to sort out a way to make sure that the company's IP does not get into the HBase code. From my point of view, this is really motivating knowing that 1) they *might* want to keep HBase and 2) they *might* put money into it (instead of burning some VC's money). Finally, I became a committer and some contributors helped so the patches kept coming.
Regarding HBase versions numbering, there is a big change. Current major version is 0.2 and the next one will be 0.18. The goal of this is that it will be clear to users what version of Hadoop they should use with each version of HBase. We will also try the follow a schedule for our releases. Here is what Jim said on the subject:
I do not want to get HBase as far behind the curve as we were with 0.2.0. Until that release, there was no version of HBase that worked with hadoop-0.17.x.Since Hadoop 0.18.0 was released, HBase is now in a feature freeze and as soon as we fix the remaining bugs a release candidate will be posted. I will try to put up some release notes before it comes out.
What I'd like to do in the future is feature freeze HBase when a new Hadoop release comes out, apply only bug fixes and release a new HBase as soon as possible after Hadoop releases.
Any features not included in a release will be included in the next one. In this way, there will always be a version of HBase that works with each released version of Hadoop shortly after the Hadoop release.
