Mark Litwintschik ties together a set of thoughts on the present and future of Hadoop:
At no point in Hadoop’s history has there been such a rich variety of features being offered as today and never before has it been so stable and battle-tested.
Hadoop projects are made up of millions of lines of code which have been written by thousands of contributors. In any given week there are 100s of developers working on the various projects. Most commercial database offerings are lucky to have a handful of engineers making any significant improvements to their code bases every week.
Mark takes a broad ecosystem approach (which I fully endorse) and so he sees the glass as more than half-full.