Over at ASF a bunch of smart people are building Hadoop and Hbase. The latter is the open-source version of the BigTable, similar to Hypertable, but written in Java (not C++) and being super actively developed in the open and under the ASF umbrella.

This reminds me of the following quote from a 1995 FOCUS interview with Bill G.:
Gates:
        No. I'm saying: We don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.