[sapek]

I think your points are valid, especially about wire format compatibility. Bond and Thrift are in fact close enough that providing Thrift compatibility is a real possibility. It wasn't high enough on our priority list to make the cut but we do in fact use some Thrift-based system internally. The impedance mismatch in the type systems are higher between Bond and Avro/Protobuf so we will have to see about those.

I hear you on the fragmentation. I know that this doesn't help the community as an explanation, but big companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft really have a good reasons to control such fundamental pieces of their infrastructure as serialization. Case in point: Facebook has forked their own Thrift project because, I presume, having it as Apache project was too restraining.

FWIW, we plan to develop Bond in public and accept contributions from the community.