There's a proposal for Thrift to go into the Apache Incubator. This seems to me to be a good move - there's increasing interest in Thrift - just look at the number of language bindings that have been contributed: Cocoa/Objective C, C++, C#, Erlang, Haskell, Java, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Squeak at the last count. It's even fairly painless to compile on Mac OS X now, although it'd be nice to have a Java version of the compiler.

Also, there are some nice synergies with other Apache projects - it is already being used in HBase, and there are moves to make it easier to use in Hadoop Core as a serialization format (so MapReduce jobs can consume and produce Thrift-formatted data).

If the proposal is accepted it will be interesting to see what happens to Hadoop's own language-neutral record serialization package, Record I/O. The momentum is certainly with Thrift and discussions on the mailing list suggest that stuff will eventually be ported to use Thrift.