Open Stack

Hi everyone,

The TC meeting yesterday uncovered an interesting question which, so
far, divided TC members.

We require that projects have a number of different developers involved
before they apply for incubation, mostly to raise the bus factor. But we
also currently require some level of diversity in that development team:
we tend to reject projects where all the development team comes from a
single company.

There are various reasons for that: we want to make sure the project
survives the loss of interest of its main corporate sponsor, we want to
make sure it takes into account more than just one company's use case,
and we want to make sure there is convergence, collaboration and open
development at play there, before we start spending common resources in
helping them integrate with the rest of OpenStack.

That said, it creates a chicken-and-egg issue: other companies are less
likely to assign resources and converge to a project unless it gets
blessed as THE future solution. And it's true that in the past a lot of
projects really ramped up their communities AFTER being incubated.

I guess there are 3 options:

1. Require diversity for incubation, but find ways to bless or recommend
projects pre-incubation so that this diversity can actually be achieved

2. Do not require diversity for incubation, but require it for
graduation, and remove projects from incubation if they fail to attract
a diverse community

3. Do not require diversity at incubation time, but at least judge the
interest of other companies: are they signed up to join in the future ?
Be ready to drop the project from incubation if that was a fake support
and the project fails to attract a diverse community

Personally I'm leaning towards (3) at the moment. Thoughts ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)