How we view OpenStack within our community here is usually vastly different than the majority of enterprises and how they view it. Side note: My biggest gripe with OpenStack leadership is actually that everything is viewed from the lens of a developer which, I feel, is contributing to the plateau/decline in its adoption. That is but that's a topic for another day. Most organizations ( as I've seen anyway) view OpenStack as a product that is compared to other cloud products like vCloud Director/similar. And after 8 years architecting clouds with it, I see it the same way. So I'm not exactly inclined to split hairs with how it is characterized. Bottom line though, ensuring that non-developers are able to easily able to get their questions answered will, in my personal opinion, either promote OpenStack or promote the conception that it requires a team of developers to understand and run which kills any serious consideration in the boardroom. Sorry to the OP, didn't mean to hijack your thread here. :) just raises an important topic th get I see come up over and over. //adam On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 2:43 AM Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> wrote:
On 2020-01-17 21:24:36 +0530 (+0530), Adam Peacock wrote: [...]
Also, we need to be clear not everyone leans towards being a developer or even *wants* to go in that direction when using OpenStack. In fact, most don't and if there is that expectation by those entrenched with the OpenStack product, the OpenStack option gets dropped in favor of something else. It's developer-friendly but we need to be mega-mega-careful, as a community, to ensure development isn't the baseline or assumption for adequate support or to get questions answered. Especially since we've converged our communication channels. [...]
Most users probably won't become developers on OpenStack, but some will, and I believe its long-term survival depends on that so we should do everything we can to encourage it. Users may also contribute in a variety of other ways like bug reporting and triage, outreach, revising or translating documentation, and so on.
OpenStack isn't a "product," it's a community software collaboration on which many companies have built products (either by running it as a service or selling support for it). Treating the community the way you might treat a paid vendor is where all of this goes to a bad place very quickly. -- Jeremy Stanley