(I am one of the authors of Crane)
The thing that happened with Crane is that it grew a lot of Twitter-specific cruft and separating that from the generally-useful bits is a serious undertaking -- and I'm not sure how much useful stuff would be left once we cut the twittery bits out. Now and then I chat with the Sqoop folks about how we can merge the two but that path isn't clear either.. so it's in a bit of a limbo, as far as being open-sourced. Sorry about that.
Not a problem you have to be sorry about, it happens. But the thing here is that announces like that implies expectation. So, IMHO, you shouldn't announce to much time ahead and announce when you know for sure there will be an actual release. Otherwise grumpy sceptics like me criticize ;-)
