Open Stack

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 11:40:21AM +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> 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

2 and 3 don't look all that different to me. Are you saying that 3
does not have any 'diversity' requirement for graduation ?

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

Where is the current definition of the "purpose" of the Incubation
process ?

I found this page but it has a disclaimer saying it might be
outdated, but the "new" page doesn't articulate any clear
purpose

   https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Approved/Incubation

Assuming for a minute the points from that page are still
at least somewhat valid

[quote]
   - Sustainable development processes
   - Growing the core development team
   - Establishing an initial user base
   - Maturing the software to an acceptable level of stability
   - Integration with OpenStack processes around testing, releases, and community management 
[/quote]

Then my interpretation is that 'Growing the core development team'
implicitly covers 'ensuring diversity'. As such I'd say option 2
is appropriate - no requirement for incubation, but mandate it for
graduation.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|