On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 9:12 PM Ghanshyam Mann <gmann@ghanshyammann.com> wrote:
This topic is a very important and critical area to solve in the OpenStack community. I personally feel and keep raising this issue wherever I get the opportunity.
To develop or maintain any software, the very first thing we need is to have enough developer resources. Without enough developers (either open or closed source), none of the software can survive.
OpenStack current situation on contributors is not the same as it was few years back. Almost every project is facing the less contributor issue as compare to requirements and incoming requests. Few projects already dead or going to be if we do not solve the less contributors issue now.
I know, TC is not directly responsible to solve this issue but we should do something or at least find the way who can solve this.
I'm not running for TC, but I figured I could chime in with some thoughts, and maybe get TC candidates to react.
What do you think about what role TC can play to solve this? What platform or entity can be used by TC to raise this issue? or any new crazy Idea?
To my knowledge, the vast majority of contributors to OpenStack are corporate contributors - meaning, they contribute to the community because it's their job. As companies have dropped out, the contributor count has diminished. Therefore, the obvious solution to the contributor dearth would be to recruit new companies that use or sell OpenStack. However, as far as I know, Red Hat is the only company remaining that still makes money from selling OpenStack as a product. am... canonical is a thing :) and im pretty sure they make money form selling
So if we're looking for new contributor companies, we would have to look to those that use OpenStack, and try to make the case that it makes sense for them to get involved in the community. I'm not sure what this kind of advocacy would look like, or towards which companies, or what kind of companies, it would be directed. Perhaps the TC candidates could have suggestions here. And if I've made any wrong assumptions, by all means correct me. The bigest users of openstack are outside of cloud operators are telcos, banks, and goverment organisations upstream contibution is not in the dna of many of those groups so it can be hard to get the ones
On Mon, 2020-04-06 at 11:17 -0400, Artom Lifshitz wrote: product support even if its availabel free in there repos by default. i was sad to see SUSE move away form openstack but there other smaller distributions of openstack that have commersal supprot. i know stackhpc support openstack via kayobe for some hpc customers for example but im sure there are others outside of the cloud providres. that are not already engaging to do so.
-gmann