Open Stack

On Oct 3, 2016, at 10:30 AM, gordon chung <gord at live.ca> wrote:

> the TC has historically been a reactive council that lets others ask for 
> change and acts as the final approver. do you believe the TC should be a 
> proactive committee that initiates change and if yes, to what scope? 
> more generally, what are some specific issues you'd like the TC address 
> in the coming year?

OK, I'm going to start with the standard cop-out answer: "It depends"

What I mean is that one of the duties of the TC is to be reactive: to act as a referee when there are issues brought to it. This can't and shouldn't change.

But I *would* like to see some more pro-active work, primarily in the area of technical matters. They are the "Technical" committee, after all. So while a heavy-handed, top-down approach is never going to work, there are areas where the TC must push all OpenStack projects forward. One area that they are already doing this is pushing projects to fully support Python 3. This is an essential technical matter, as Python 2 will be unsupported by 2020, and it is the TC's job to ensure that all of OpenStack is ready.

One other area where I would like to see the TC actively promote is in modernizing the architecture of the projects to keep up with the changes in the underlying technologies. Having been involved in the initial design decisions in 2010, I can state with certainty that had those same discussion been held in 2016, we would have made very different choices. That's the nature of the world we operate in, and while change for the sake of change is a waste of time, change to keep OpenStack from becoming a outdated dinosaur is essential.

Tying those two points together brings me to a third: the expansion of languages used in OpenStack. We are and always have been a Python project. There were newer languages with some support by a few developers in the beginning, but as both Nova and Swift were Python, OpenStack was Python. And as things change, new languages will always come around that have some benefits that developers like. But experience tells me that every time you introduce a new language into the mix, you fracture the community. Yes, I know about Javascript in Horizon, but that's a particular case, as web browsers do not natively support Python. As long as we keep current with Python and its evolution, there is no good reason to fracture the development community within OpenStack. In the specific case of Swift and the use of Go, I wrote about my feelings here: http://blog.leafe.com/on_swift/ 

And thanks for posting this question. There is not nearly enough discussion when it comes to TC elections.

-- Ed Leafe