Open Stack

On Wed, 2014-02-05 at 17:22 +0100, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> (This email is mostly directed to PTLs for programs that include one
> integrated project)
> 
> The DefCore subcommittee from the OpenStack board of directors asked the
> Technical Committee yesterday about which code sections in each
> integrated project should be "designated sections" in the sense of [1]
> (code you're actually needed to run or include to be allowed to use the
> trademark). That determines where you can run alternate code (think:
> substitute your own private hypervisor driver) and still be able to call
> the result openstack.
> 
> [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/CoreDefinition
> 
> PTLs and their teams are obviously the best placed to define this, so it
> seems like the process should be: PTLs propose designated sections to
> the TC, which blesses them, combines them and forwards the result to the
> DefCore committee. We could certainly leverage part of the governance
> repo to make sure the lists are kept up to date.
> 
> Comments, thoughts ?

I think what would be useful to the board is if we could describe at a
high level which parts of each project have a pluggable interface and
whether we encourage out-of-tree implementations of those pluggable
interfaces.

That's actually a pretty tedious thing to document properly - think
about e.g. whether we encourage out-of-tree WSGI middlewares.

There's a flip-side to this "designated sections" thing that bothers me
after talking it through with Michael Still - I think it's perfectly
reasonable for vendors to e.g. backport fixes to their products without
that backport ever seeing the light of day upstream (say it was too
invasive for the stable branch).

This can't be a case of e.g. enforcing the sha1 sums of files. If we
want to go that route, let's just use the AGPL :)

I don't have a big issue with the way the Foundation currently enforces
"you must use the code" - anyone who signs a trademark agreement with
the Foundation agrees to "include the entirety of" Nova's code. That's
very vague, but I assume the Foundation can terminate the agreement if
it thinks the other party is acting in bad faith.

Basically, I'm concerned about us swinging from a rather lax "you must
include our code" rule to an overly strict "you must make no downstream
modifications to our code".

Mark.