[openstack-dev] Diversity as a requirement for incubation

Doug Hellmann doug.hellmann at dreamhost.com
Wed Dec 18 14:27:35 UTC 2013


On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com>wrote:

> 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 outdated, but the "new" page doesn't articulate any clear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


The most current approved list is at
http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/incubation-integration-requirements(we're
working on publishing those to a more readable format and updating
wiki references).

Doug



>
>
> 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
> --
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