Open Stack

[This is meant to be one of (I hope) several conversation-provoking
questions directed at prospective TC members to help the community
understand their positions before considering how to vote in the
ongoing election.]

In the course of evaluating new projects that have asked to join
as official members of the OpenStack community, we often discuss
whether the feature set of the project overlaps too much with other
existing projects. This came up within the last year during Glare's
application, and more recently as part of the Adjutant application.

Our current policy regarding Open Development is that a project
should cooperate with existing projects "rather than gratuitously
competing or reinventing the wheel." [1] The flexibility provided
by the use of the term "gratuitously" has allowed us to support
multiple solutions in the deployment and telemetry problem spaces.
At the same time it has left us with questions about how (and
whether) the community would be able to replace the implementation
of any given component with a new set of technologies by "starting
from scratch".

Where do you draw the line at "gratuitous"?

What benefits and drawbacks do you see in supporting multiple tools
with similar features?

How would our community be different, in positive and negative ways,
if we were more strict about avoiding such overlap?

Doug

[1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/new-projects-requirements.html