Sponsoring Howl as an incubator project

[Alan Gates]

Last week I sent an email proposing that we, the Pig project, sponsor  
Howl as an incubator project.  You can see the thread at http://tinyurl.com/4acfut4 
.

However, in proposing this I did not realize that I was also proposing  
that Howl should become a Pig subproject upon graduation from the  
incubator.  (See http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Roles_and_Responsibilities.html#Sponsor 
 for details).  This has, understandably, caused some confusion in  
the Hive community since Howl uses large amounts of their code and is  
intended as a shared service between Pig, Hive, and MapReduce.

So, after further consideration, I think it would be better if we ask  
the Apache Incubator to sponsor the project.  This way we are not  
setting Howl on a trajectory to become a Pig subproject.  However, we  
did vote to sponsor it. So, before submitting the proposal without Pig  
as a sponsor, I wanted to check with those who voted for it that they  
are ok with course of action.

Alan.