Open Stack

On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 13:19 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > Here's a first attempt at a "direction motion" for the TC to vote on:
> > 
> >   The concepts of "what is core" and "what is in OpenStack" have been 
> >   conflated until now. The TC cares far more about the process for new
> >   projects to be included in the coordinated release than it cares about
> >   which projects are required to be used by providers in order to access
> >   the trademark.
> 
> That's the main point for me. By separating the two issues ("what is
> developed within openstack" and "what is core openstack"), we clearly
> separate what is BoD responsibility and what is TC responsibility, which
> is a great way to avoid conflict between the two governance bodies
> (which is what we are being asked to proactively resolve here).

Yep.

> >   We would like to take an inclusive but measured approach to accepting
> >   new OpenStack projects. We should evaluate any given proposed project
> >   on whether it embraces our values and processes, is useful to
> >   OpenStack users, well integrated with other projects and represents a
> >   sensible broadening of the scope of OpenStack.
> 
> Note that this still doesn't give crystal-clear guidelines on how to
> judge what is promising/complementary/useful. Even if we don't have to
> care about trademark anymore, we might still need to come up with more
> defined guidelines for acceptation than personal gut feeling...

Absolutely - the TC needs to make those criteria very clear. A starting
point might be what I wrote up in the footnote of this mail:

  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2012-November/002470.html

However, I think those criteria are the responsibility of the TC. We
just need to explain to the Board the rough idea we have for these
criteria. Details can come later.

> >   We see Incubation as a trial period where promising projects have the 
> >   opportunity to demonstrate their suitability for inclusion in our 
> >   coordinated releases.
> 
> A consequence of that is we would judge if the project scope is
> promising/complementary/useful for OpenStack at the moment the project
> applies for incubation. And we would promote it out of incubation if it
> matured enough to be included in the full next release cycle. I
> personally think that's OK (removes the risk of following the whole
> incubation process for nothing).

Yep.

> >   We see the term "Core OpenStack Project" in section 4.1.b of the  
> >   bylaws as being solely related to trademark guidelines. We would be 
> >   happy to see the term "Core" fall into disuse and for the Foundation 
> >   to simply maintain a list of projects required for trademark usage.
> 
> I'm not sure we should recommend that the "Core" term falls into disuse.
> If the BoD wants to keep using "Core" as meaning "part of the
> coordinated release AND required for trademark use" (which is what the
> bylaws say, emphasis is mine), then I'm perfectly OK with it.

Yeah, me too. Mostly.

However, changing the commonly understood definition of a term can be
harder than just dropping the term and adopting a new term with the new
definition.

> What I think we actually want is to redefine "OpenStack projects" as
> being "Services + Library + Gating + Supporting" (instead of Core +
> Library + Gating + Supporting), with "OpenStack Services" being the
> projects sharing the same release cycle. Have incubation be the trial
> period to prove you can become an official OpenStack Service. Then let
> the BoD pick which of those "OpenStack projects" they want to consider
> "core" for trademark use.

Do we really need to have these classifications in the bylaws?

The set of "OpenStack projects" is whatever the TC chooses to include.
We may classify those projects, but a new project doesn't have to fit
into an existing class to be accepted.

i.e. if a new project comes along that doesn't nicely fit into the
"Services" class, I don't think we necessarily need to revisit all this
again with the Board.

How does this update sound?

  The concepts of "what is core" and "what is in OpenStack" have been 
  conflated until now. The TC cares far more about the process for new
  projects to be included in the coordinated release than it cares about
  which projects are required to be used by providers in order to access
  the trademark.

  We would like to take an inclusive but measured approach to accepting
  new OpenStack projects. We should evaluate any given proposed project
  on a well defined set of criteria like whether it embraces our values
  and processes, is useful to OpenStack users, well integrated with
  other projects and represents a sensible broadening of the scope of
  OpenStack.

  We see Incubation as a trial period where promising projects have the 
  opportunity to demonstrate their suitability for inclusion in our 
  coordinated releases.

  We see the term "Core OpenStack Project" in section 4.1.b of the  
  bylaws as being solely related to trademark guidelines. The Foundation
  should simply maintain a list of projects required for trademark 
  usage. We would be happy for that list to be called "Core Projects" 
  or for a new name to be chosen to describe that list.

Cheers,
Mark.