This is one BigTop commiter's initial take on our community goals.  We will modify this in time to reflect something all members agree with, but in my estimation, this largely sums up our collective view of our role in the hadoop ecosystem.

• BigTop's goal is to build a stronger community around big data and hadoop, and to
• take apache artifacts and make them into something easily consumable. 

We like to work with vendors as well, where interests are aligned. 

• We have no interest in subverting the messages or goals of hadoop or big data vendors : In fact,
• our product is different then theirs, as we do upstream packaging of a subset of the hadoop ecosystem which is customizable, where as  vendor's provide end to end products for businesses.

BigTop fits nicely into this picture.

• Its a gateway drug for testing interoperability of different big data tools against one another, and also,
• a proof of concept  for bridging these tools to a coherent product.

As an example, consider Apache Spark. 

• Spark needs a persistance layer (HDFS), and it may also require
• a transactional layer (like HBase). 

One of our goals is to find and fix issues in the upstream as fast as possible, so that both vendors and users can have a better big data experience, with or without BigTop. The packages we produce lend themselves quite naturally to use on a variety of systems and platforms.

If you are a business, and are curious about how BigTop can help you, or are interestes in collaborating, reach out to us. 

We sometimes get a little carried away in promoting our own product - if we go too far, feel free to respond to us out in the open. 

TL;DR?

It takes a village to keep all the forces in big data balanced, and aligned - and we invite all players in the space to come play with us, borrow some of our ideas, and even compete with us, in a healthy and vibrant manner !