> The reason each project has its own version defined is to ensure that the parent or grandparent (jclouds) can be a different version than 
> the child projects (karaf). Or am I missing something?

I don't think so. With some experiments, the following does seem to work: run `mvn release:prepare` with both the jclouds-project and the current project version set to snapshots. Maven will prompt you to resolve all the jclouds "core" dependencies before proceeding with the release, and you can choose to set them to any release version you wish.

Maven will then reset the "core" dependencies (including jclouds-project) to a new version that could even differ from the post-release version of this project.

So there should actually be no need for a separate `<version>` tag in the top level _or_ project POMs of Karaf or CLI, for that matter.