[openstack-dev] [all][tc] Moving away from "big tent" terminology

John Griffith john.griffith8 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 15 14:31:02 UTC 2017


On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 3:15 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Back in 2014, OpenStack was facing a problem. Our project structure,
> inherited from days where Nova, Swift and friends were the only game in
> town, was not working anymore. The "integrated release" that we ended up
> producing was not really integrated, already too big to be installed by
> everyone, and yet too small to accommodate the growing interest in other
> forms of "open infrastructure". The incubation process (from stackforge
> to incubated, from incubated to integrated) created catch-22s that
> prevented projects from gathering enough interest to reach the upper
> layers. Something had to give.
>
> The project structure reform[1] that resulted from those discussions
> switched to a simpler model: project teams would be approved based on
> how well they fit the OpenStack overall mission and community
> principles, rather than based on a degree of maturity. It was nicknamed
> "the big tent" based on a blogpost[2] that Monty wrote -- mostly
> explaining that things produced by the OpenStack community should be
> considered OpenStack projects.
>
> So the reform removed the concept of incubated vs. integrated, in favor
> of a single "official" category. Tags[3] were introduced to better
> describe the degree of maturity of the various official things. "Being
> part of the big tent" was synonymous to "being an official project" (but
> people kept saying the former).
>
> At around the same time, mostly for technical reasons around the
> difficulty of renaming git repositories, the "stackforge/" git
> repository prefix was discontinued (all projects hosted on OpenStack
> infrastructure would be created under an "openstack/" git repository
> prefix).
>
> All those events combined, though, sent a mixed message, which we are
> still struggling with today. "Big tent" has a flea market connotation of
> "everyone can come in". Combined with the fact that all git repositories
> are under the same prefix, it created a lot of confusion. Some people
> even think the big tent is the openstack/ namespace, not the list of
> official projects. We tried to stop using the "big tent" meme, but (I
> blame Monty), the name is still sticking. I think it's time to more
> aggressively get rid of it. We tried using "unofficial" and "official"
> terminology, but that did not stick either.
>
> I'd like to propose that we introduce a new concept: "OpenStack-Hosted
> projects". There would be "OpenStack projects" on one side, and
> "Projects hosted on OpenStack infrastructure" on the other side (all
> still under the openstack/ git repo prefix). We'll stop saying "official
> OpenStack project" and "unofficial OpenStack project". The only
> "OpenStack projects" will be the official ones. We'll chase down the
> last mentions of "big tent" in documentation and remove it from our
> vocabulary.
>
> I think this new wording (replacing what was previously Stackforge,
> replacing what was previously called "unofficial OpenStack projects")
> will bring some clarity as to what is OpenStack and what is beyond it.
>
> Thoughts ?
>
> [1]
> https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20141202-
> project-structure-reform-spec.html
> [2] http://inaugust.com/posts/big-tent.html
> [3] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/tags/index.html
>
> --
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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​I like it, and I actually like the naming.  "Friends of OpenStack" is way
too touchy feely, koomba ya.  True there's not a glaring distinction in the
names (OpenStack Project vs OpenStack Hosted), but I thought that was kind
of a good thing.  A sort of compromise between the two extremes we've had
in the past.​  Either way, whatever the names etc, the concept seems solid
to me and I think might be more clear for those trying to wrap their head
around things.
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