I see one significant benefit to having Release Plan votes: Fewer releases with more members of the community working on any given release. In turn, fewer Hadoop releases implies less confusion for end users attempting to download and use an Apache Hadoop release.
If there are a dozen different releases of Apache Hadoop available for download at the Apache Hadoop website, end users will go to a commercial vendor packaged version of Hadoop. That is not good for the Apache Hadoop community as a whole. Jagane
