[tc][election] campaign discussion: how TC can solve the less contributor issue?
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.
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?
-gmann
Hello Ghanshyam,
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.
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?
I believe this is well beyond my area of expertise and you might have already answered yourself in that this is well beyond what TC could realistically do. ;-) On the other hand, the points I discuss in the other threads may contribute to change in perception of OpenStack as a whole and make it easier to find eager contributors.
Another fact is this should be really considered per-project. The core projects are churning well, then non-core not-so-much.
Yet another thing to notice here is that human success of OpenStack depends A LOT on human success of OpenDev. Despite the split, TC should keep a close eye on OpenDev progression.
-yoctozepto
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.
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?
I think this has unfortunately become a self-inflicted wound by us sticking to our ways and refusing to adopt change. The space and landscape has changed so much over the past few years and we've stuck to our ways and refused to adopt these technologies.
I think by adding more things that natively run on top of Kubernetes, we add a whole set of potential contributors who can use those OpenStack components that want to run Kubernetes only.
-gmann
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 09:49:47 -0500 Mohammed Naser mnaser@vexxhost.com wrote ----
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.
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?
I think this has unfortunately become a self-inflicted wound by us sticking to our ways and refusing to adopt change. The space and landscape has changed so much over the past few years and we've stuck to our ways and refused to adopt these technologies.
I think by adding more things that natively run on top of Kubernetes, we add a whole set of potential contributors who can use those OpenStack components that want to run Kubernetes only.
This is an interesting idea but I am thinking it another way around. If contributors and requirements from those adjacent technologies come together then we can adopt or integrate those in OpenStack. For example, k8s SIG starts gathering requirements and *resources* to fill the 'Z gap' between OpenStack's X component and k8s. Otherwise, it end up with "yes this is good to do but who will do it ?"
-gmann
-gmann
-- Mohammed Naser — vexxhost
D. 514-316-8872 D. 800-910-1726 ext. 200 E. mnaser@vexxhost.com W. https://vexxhost.com
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. 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.
-gmann
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz alifshit@redhat.com wrote:
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. 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.
-gmann
I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) and enable the use of it with customers.
Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what they can understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contribute to projects because they make money from their investment.
Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features. We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seem to me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to use this amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down.
If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
On 4/6/20 08:36, Donny Davis wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz <alifshit@redhat.com mailto:alifshit@redhat.com> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 9:12 PM Ghanshyam Mann <gmann@ghanshyammann.com <mailto: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. 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.I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) and enable the use of it with customers.
Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what they can understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contribute to projects because they make money from their investment.
Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features. We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seem to me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to use this amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down.
If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
I'm not running for the TC either but wanted say Donny's reply here resonates with me. When I first started working on OpenStack, I was at Yahoo (now Verizon Media), a company who consumes OpenStack and depends on it for a (now) large portion of their infrastructure.
At the time I joined the OpenStack community in 2012, the docs about contributing and the docs about each component were dead simple. I was up and running in under a day and started my first contributions upstream shortly after.
Fast forward to now, I find the docs are hard to read and navigate. There's not much layman's terms. And most of all, at least in Nova, is that the docs are in dire need of being organized. They used to be simple but when docs moved in-tree things were hastily cobbled together because as you mentioned, we're always already stretched trying to deliver bleeding edge features.
And, there are also differences in opinion about how docs should be organized and how verbose they are. I have seen docs evolve from simple to complicated because for example: someone thought they were making an improvement, whereas I might think they were making the docs less usable. I'm not aware that there is any guideline or reference documentation that is to be used as a design goal. Such as, "this is what your landing page should look like", "here's how docs should be organized", "you should have these sections", etc.
Sometimes I have thought about proposing a bunch of changes to how our docs are organized. But, full disclosure, I worry that if I do that and if it gets accepted/merged, someone else will completely change all of it later and then all the organization and work I did goes out the window. And I think this worry highlights the fact that there is no "right way" of doing the docs. It's just opinion and everyone has a different opinion.
I'm not sure whether that's solvable. I mentioned a guideline or design goal to aspire to, but at the same time, we don't want to be so rigid that projects can't do docs the way they want. So then what? Per project design goals and guidelines I guess? Or is that too much process? I have wondered how other communities have managed success in the docs department.
So, back to the contributors point. I was lucky because by the time docs got hard to consume, I already knew the ropes. I don't know how hard it has been for newer contributors to join since then and how much of the difficulty is related to docs.
I'm not sure I've said anything useful, so apologies for derailing the discussion if I've done that.
-melanie
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 3:49 PM melanie witt melwittt@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/6/20 08:36, Donny Davis wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz <alifshit@redhat.com mailto:alifshit@redhat.com> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 9:12 PM Ghanshyam Mann <gmann@ghanshyammann.com <mailto: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, thecontributor
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. 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.I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) and enable the use of it with customers.
Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what they can understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contribute to projects because they make money from their investment.
Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features. We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seem to me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to use this amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down.
If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
I'm not running for the TC either but wanted say Donny's reply here resonates with me. When I first started working on OpenStack, I was at Yahoo (now Verizon Media), a company who consumes OpenStack and depends on it for a (now) large portion of their infrastructure.
At the time I joined the OpenStack community in 2012, the docs about contributing and the docs about each component were dead simple. I was up and running in under a day and started my first contributions upstream shortly after.
Fast forward to now, I find the docs are hard to read and navigate. There's not much layman's terms. And most of all, at least in Nova, is that the docs are in dire need of being organized. They used to be simple but when docs moved in-tree things were hastily cobbled together because as you mentioned, we're always already stretched trying to deliver bleeding edge features.
And, there are also differences in opinion about how docs should be organized and how verbose they are. I have seen docs evolve from simple to complicated because for example: someone thought they were making an improvement, whereas I might think they were making the docs less usable. I'm not aware that there is any guideline or reference documentation that is to be used as a design goal. Such as, "this is what your landing page should look like", "here's how docs should be organized", "you should have these sections", etc.
Sometimes I have thought about proposing a bunch of changes to how our docs are organized. But, full disclosure, I worry that if I do that and if it gets accepted/merged, someone else will completely change all of it later and then all the organization and work I did goes out the window. And I think this worry highlights the fact that there is no "right way" of doing the docs. It's just opinion and everyone has a different opinion.
I'm not sure whether that's solvable. I mentioned a guideline or design goal to aspire to, but at the same time, we don't want to be so rigid that projects can't do docs the way they want. So then what? Per project design goals and guidelines I guess? Or is that too much process? I have wondered how other communities have managed success in the docs department.
So, back to the contributors point. I was lucky because by the time docs got hard to consume, I already knew the ropes. I don't know how hard it has been for newer contributors to join since then and how much of the difficulty is related to docs.
I'm not sure I've said anything useful, so apologies for derailing the discussion if I've done that.
-melanie
I have had a couple conversations about trying to put together "docs for mere mortals", but it comes down to time and the right place for it to go. I understand we as a community are not really supposed to have an "opinion" on how to best put together a cloud, but maybe it's time we take the collective wisdom from those who know what works and what doesn't... and put something together for all of us normal people out there. I am just a simple human, and I do not think I am alone. This is not meant to be a "our docs suck and we need to refactor them all"... it's more so a "we have the content and the wisdom, so let's build something that someone can put in prod and stand on it."
From my perspective this has literally been our barrier to adoption.
On 4/6/20 13:03, Donny Davis wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 3:49 PM melanie witt <melwittt@gmail.com mailto:melwittt@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/6/20 08:36, Donny Davis wrote: > On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz <alifshit@redhat.com <mailto:alifshit@redhat.com> > <mailto:alifshit@redhat.com <mailto:alifshit@redhat.com>>> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 9:12 PM Ghanshyam Mann > <gmann@ghanshyammann.com <mailto:gmann@ghanshyammann.com> <mailto:gmann@ghanshyammann.com <mailto: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. > 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. > > I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my > job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) and > enable the use of it with customers. > > Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. > Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what they > can understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's > because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contribute > to projects because they make money from their investment. > > Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We > have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features. > We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in > layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seem > to me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, > it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to use > this amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors > leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down. > > If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no > amount of technical change will make an impactful difference. I'm not running for the TC either but wanted say Donny's reply here resonates with me. When I first started working on OpenStack, I was at Yahoo (now Verizon Media), a company who consumes OpenStack and depends on it for a (now) large portion of their infrastructure. At the time I joined the OpenStack community in 2012, the docs about contributing and the docs about each component were dead simple. I was up and running in under a day and started my first contributions upstream shortly after. Fast forward to now, I find the docs are hard to read and navigate. There's not much layman's terms. And most of all, at least in Nova, is that the docs are in dire need of being organized. They used to be simple but when docs moved in-tree things were hastily cobbled together because as you mentioned, we're always already stretched trying to deliver bleeding edge features. And, there are also differences in opinion about how docs should be organized and how verbose they are. I have seen docs evolve from simple to complicated because for example: someone thought they were making an improvement, whereas I might think they were making the docs less usable. I'm not aware that there is any guideline or reference documentation that is to be used as a design goal. Such as, "this is what your landing page should look like", "here's how docs should be organized", "you should have these sections", etc. Sometimes I have thought about proposing a bunch of changes to how our docs are organized. But, full disclosure, I worry that if I do that and if it gets accepted/merged, someone else will completely change all of it later and then all the organization and work I did goes out the window. And I think this worry highlights the fact that there is no "right way" of doing the docs. It's just opinion and everyone has a different opinion. I'm not sure whether that's solvable. I mentioned a guideline or design goal to aspire to, but at the same time, we don't want to be so rigid that projects can't do docs the way they want. So then what? Per project design goals and guidelines I guess? Or is that too much process? I have wondered how other communities have managed success in the docs department. So, back to the contributors point. I was lucky because by the time docs got hard to consume, I already knew the ropes. I don't know how hard it has been for newer contributors to join since then and how much of the difficulty is related to docs. I'm not sure I've said anything useful, so apologies for derailing the discussion if I've done that.I have had a couple conversations about trying to put together "docs for mere mortals", but it comes down to time and the right place for it to go. I understand we as a community are not really supposed to have an "opinion" on how to best put together a cloud, but maybe it's time we take the collective wisdom from those who know what works and what doesn't... and put something together for all of us normal people out there.
To be clear, I don't think we have different opinions about how to best put together a cloud. When I say different opinions I mean different opinions about how to organize the doc pages, how much verbosity to have in the content, that sort of thing.
I have a personal opinion that being too verbose and detailed in the "main" content page for a concept can make it needlessly hard to understand and not end up helping the reader. In a case like that I'd prefer "main" content to be very concise and then have a link to all the gory details if someone wants to read that as well.
Sorry if I made it sound like we differ in opinion about how to put together the cloud.
-melanie
I am just a simple human, and I do not think I am alone. This is not meant to be a "our docs suck and we need to refactor them all"... it's more so a "we have the content and the wisdom, so let's build something that someone can put in prod and stand on it."
From my perspective this has literally been our barrier to adoption.
~/DonnyD C: 805 814 6800 "No mission too difficult. No sacrifice too great. Duty First"
+1 to Melanie comments. I feel exactly the same. And this is specialy hard for Operators.
Belmiro
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 9:57 PM melanie witt melwittt@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/6/20 08:36, Donny Davis wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz <alifshit@redhat.com mailto:alifshit@redhat.com> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 9:12 PM Ghanshyam Mann <gmann@ghanshyammann.com <mailto: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, thecontributor
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. 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.I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) and enable the use of it with customers.
Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what they can understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contribute to projects because they make money from their investment.
Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features. We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seem to me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to use this amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down.
If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
I'm not running for the TC either but wanted say Donny's reply here resonates with me. When I first started working on OpenStack, I was at Yahoo (now Verizon Media), a company who consumes OpenStack and depends on it for a (now) large portion of their infrastructure.
At the time I joined the OpenStack community in 2012, the docs about contributing and the docs about each component were dead simple. I was up and running in under a day and started my first contributions upstream shortly after.
Fast forward to now, I find the docs are hard to read and navigate. There's not much layman's terms. And most of all, at least in Nova, is that the docs are in dire need of being organized. They used to be simple but when docs moved in-tree things were hastily cobbled together because as you mentioned, we're always already stretched trying to deliver bleeding edge features.
And, there are also differences in opinion about how docs should be organized and how verbose they are. I have seen docs evolve from simple to complicated because for example: someone thought they were making an improvement, whereas I might think they were making the docs less usable. I'm not aware that there is any guideline or reference documentation that is to be used as a design goal. Such as, "this is what your landing page should look like", "here's how docs should be organized", "you should have these sections", etc.
Sometimes I have thought about proposing a bunch of changes to how our docs are organized. But, full disclosure, I worry that if I do that and if it gets accepted/merged, someone else will completely change all of it later and then all the organization and work I did goes out the window. And I think this worry highlights the fact that there is no "right way" of doing the docs. It's just opinion and everyone has a different opinion.
I'm not sure whether that's solvable. I mentioned a guideline or design goal to aspire to, but at the same time, we don't want to be so rigid that projects can't do docs the way they want. So then what? Per project design goals and guidelines I guess? Or is that too much process? I have wondered how other communities have managed success in the docs department.
So, back to the contributors point. I was lucky because by the time docs got hard to consume, I already knew the ropes. I don't know how hard it has been for newer contributors to join since then and how much of the difficulty is related to docs.
I'm not sure I've said anything useful, so apologies for derailing the discussion if I've done that.
-melanie
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 10:36:49 -0500 Donny Davis donny@fortnebula.com wrote ----
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz alifshit@redhat.com wrote: 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. 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.
-gmann
I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) andenable the use of it with customers. Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what theycan understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contributeto projects because they make money from their investment. Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features.We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seemto me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to usethis amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down. If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
Ok, this is one of the key things and I am 100% agree on your point - "our docs would seem to me to be other developers". Does this include 'feature doc & how to use them' or overall usage of OpenStack like "Project X and Y can solve the use case Z" (what Radosław mentioned in this reply) ?
As you might know, our documentation team is lacking active contributors and moving towards SIG and almost all the documents are moved/maintain on project side. Do you think that is the issue and can make the current doc more worst (with the typical developer nature)?
Again the same question is here, 'How to get the documents contributors ?' Can operators help here with their use cases, best practice etc ? If so then how to convince them to participate and contribute in the community?
-gmann
-- ~/DonnyDC: 805 814 6800"No mission too difficult. No sacrifice too great. Duty First"
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 4:03 PM Ghanshyam Mann gmann@ghanshyammann.com wrote:
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 10:36:49 -0500 Donny Davis donny@fortnebula.com wrote ----
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Artom Lifshitz alifshit@redhat.com
wrote:
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. 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.
-gmann
I don't think you are too far off. I used to work in a place where my
job was to help sell Openstack (among other products) andenable the use of it with customers.
Customers drive everything vendors do. Things that sell are easy to
use. Customers don't buy the best products, they buy what theycan understand fastest. If customers are asking for a product, it's because they understand its value. Vendors in turn contributeto projects because they make money from their investment.
Now think about the perception and reality of Openstack as a whole. We
have spent the last decade or so writing bleeding edge features.We have spent very little time on documenting what we do have in layman's terms. The intended audience of our docs would seemto me to be other developers. I hope people don't take that as a jab, it's just the truth. If someone cannot understand how to usethis amazing technology, it won't sell. If it doesn't sell, vendors leave, if vendors leave the number of contributors goes down.
If we don't start working at making Openstack easier to consume, then
no amount of technical change will make an impactful difference.
Ok, this is one of the key things and I am 100% agree on your point - "our docs would seem to me to be other developers". Does this include 'feature doc & how to use them' or overall usage of OpenStack like "Project X and Y can solve the use case Z" (what Radosław mentioned in this reply) ?
As you might know, our documentation team is lacking active contributors and moving towards SIG and almost all the documents are moved/maintain on project side. Do you think that is the issue and can make the current doc more worst (with the typical developer nature)?
Again the same question is here, 'How to get the documents contributors ?' Can operators help here with their use cases, best practice etc ? If so then how to convince them to participate and contribute in the community?
-gmann
-- ~/DonnyDC: 805 814 6800"No mission too difficult. No sacrifice too
great. Duty First"
Our docs team is completely overloaded. There is no way I see them having the capacity to come up with something. We need a team of operators who know how operators read, think and talk to put together a consumable document pointed directly at other would be operators / potential new adopters. We need to target new users who don't know anything about Openstack or in many cases cloud in general. These Operators don't need to know all the switches and knobs they *can* turn in Openstack when they are in the learning phase. The ones that do, already know how it all works anyways and the current doc set works great for them.
How do we get contributors to this doc - well I don't really have the answer for that. It's not going to be easy to say the least. Maybe put out a marketing campaign to find Operators who are willing to contribute.
It's also not just docs - because anyone who has been in IT for more than 12 seconds knows many people don't / won't read docs. Maybe a simple to understand video series would be super helpful to get people off the ground.
I really don't have all the answers, but I do know for sure that building a cloud is hard - so let's make it easier.
On 2020-04-06 15:03:06 -0500 (-0500), Ghanshyam Mann wrote: [...]
As you might know, our documentation team is lacking active contributors and moving towards SIG
[...]
For a moment I thought I was watching a rerun. The Documentation team was officially disbanded by https://review.opendev.org/691277 roughly 5 months ago (you even voted on that change) in favor of a Technical Writing SIG created a month before with https://review.opendev.org/691277 . This has already happened.
On Mon, 2020-04-06 at 11:17 -0400, Artom Lifshitz wrote:
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 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.
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 that are not already engaging to do so.
-gmann
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 10:17:59 -0500 Artom Lifshitz alifshit@redhat.com wrote ----
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. 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.
But there are other companies making money out of it as product or support or base product etc. This is the Users vs Contributors table here, I hope all users making money less or more :) : - https://governance.openstack.org/tc/user_survey/analysis-12-2019.html#to-whi...
-gmann
-gmann
Hi Ghanshyam,
Unfortunately, OpenStack is still for the most part corporate in terms of developer resources. It sort of makes sense, it's a cloud platform, and you need a certain scale to justify the costs for learning, adopting and operating. I probably wouldn't be contributing now if my first introduction to OpenStack wasn't as part of my job operating and developing a cloud.
I don't see a clear path to solve that, but I see a few potential ways to help.
1. Advertising and marketing the viability of specific OpenStack projects as standalone tools. I can see value for someone needing a volume service, and if Cinder: a) fits the requirements b) is easy to deploy and learn (eg., well documented standalone use case and tested) c) brings a minimum set of cruft with it. This might encourage more people to use it and encourage wider adoption of the other OpenStack projects if their experience is a good one, with OpenStack becoming a trusted toolbox.
2. Making sure we invest more time and effort on documentation. Especially with regards to information on getting started, best practices in terms of architecture, configuration and deployment, and of course contributors guides. We're already a very friendly and welcoming community.
3. Investigating and working on integrating OpenStack much more closely with other cloud tools. We're great for IaaS, but clouds today are not only IaaS and we need to evolve and play nice with everything else that someone might encounter in a datacenter. Mohammed brings a great point about integrating with Kubernetes. All these integrations need to be well documented, including best practices, and part of our testing infrastructure.
To summarize, I would like to see OpenStack scale better. From homelabbers or small businesses who only need a few services, to large datacenters who may be running multiple OpenStacks, multiple Kuberneteses/OpenShifts, monitoring tools, billing systems. This may result in an increase in adoption, which in turn, should result in an increase in contributions.
I can see the above becoming community goals and the TC doing outreach to document the process and help out.
On Apr 4, 2020, at 9:09 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.
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?
-gmann
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 11:23:10 -0500 Nikolla, Kristi knikolla@bu.edu wrote ----
Hi Ghanshyam,
Unfortunately, OpenStack is still for the most part corporate in terms of developer resources. It sort of makes sense, it's a cloud platform, and you need a certain scale to justify the costs for learning, adopting and operating. I probably wouldn't be contributing now if my first introduction to OpenStack wasn't as part of my job operating and developing a cloud.
I don't see a clear path to solve that, but I see a few potential ways to help.
- Advertising and marketing the viability of specific OpenStack projects as standalone tools. I can see value for someone needing a volume service, and if Cinder: a) fits the requirements b) is easy to deploy and learn (eg., well documented standalone use case and tested) c) brings a minimum set of cruft with it. This might encourage more people to use it and encourage wider adoption of the other OpenStack projects if their experience is a good one, with OpenStack becoming a trusted toolbox.
+1 on this. If someone seeing OpenStack as all 52 projects together then they will just go way from it. ONAP was one of good example to learn from it in term of modularity on use cases side.
- Making sure we invest more time and effort on documentation. Especially with regards to information on getting started, best practices in terms of architecture, configuration and deployment, and of course contributors guides. We're already a very friendly and welcoming community.
Contributors guide has been improved a lot and Upstream training, mentorship program, FC SIG doing the continuous effort for many years to get new people onboard but that only not solving this issue. Do you think we still lack on helping new contributors onboard or something more interesting idea to attract them?
- Investigating and working on integrating OpenStack much more closely with other cloud tools. We're great for IaaS, but clouds today are not only IaaS and we need to evolve and play nice with everything else that someone might encounter in a datacenter. Mohammed brings a great point about integrating with Kubernetes. All these integrations need to be well documented, including best practices, and part of our testing infrastructure.
To summarize, I would like to see OpenStack scale better. From homelabbers or small businesses who only need a few services, to large datacenters who may be running multiple OpenStacks, multiple Kuberneteses/OpenShifts, monitoring tools, billing systems. This may result in an increase in adoption, which in turn, should result in an increase in contributions.
I can see the above becoming community goals and the TC doing outreach to document the process and help out.
On Apr 4, 2020, at 9:09 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.
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?
-gmann
On Apr 6, 2020, at 4:16 PM, Ghanshyam Mann gmann@ghanshyammann.com wrote:
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 11:23:10 -0500 Nikolla, Kristi knikolla@bu.edu wrote ----
Hi Ghanshyam,
Unfortunately, OpenStack is still for the most part corporate in terms of developer resources. It sort of makes sense, it's a cloud platform, and you need a certain scale to justify the costs for learning, adopting and operating. I probably wouldn't be contributing now if my first introduction to OpenStack wasn't as part of my job operating and developing a cloud.
I don't see a clear path to solve that, but I see a few potential ways to help.
- Advertising and marketing the viability of specific OpenStack projects as standalone tools. I can see value for someone needing a volume service, and if Cinder: a) fits the requirements b) is easy to deploy and learn (eg., well documented standalone use case and tested) c) brings a minimum set of cruft with it. This might encourage more people to use it and encourage wider adoption of the other OpenStack projects if their experience is a good one, with OpenStack becoming a trusted toolbox.
+1 on this. If someone seeing OpenStack as all 52 projects together then they will just go way from it. ONAP was one of good example to learn from it in term of modularity on use cases side.
- Making sure we invest more time and effort on documentation. Especially with regards to information on getting started, best practices in terms of architecture, configuration and deployment, and of course contributors guides. We're already a very friendly and welcoming community.
Contributors guide has been improved a lot and Upstream training, mentorship program, FC SIG doing the continuous effort for many years to get new people onboard but that only not solving this issue. Do you think we still lack on helping new contributors onboard or something more interesting idea to attract them?
With regards to non-corporate: You can't really contribute to a project effectively (or even feel the motivation to) if you're not using it or integrating with it in some form. All the documentation in the world is not going to help with that. That's why I think the other 2 points that I mentioned are important.
With regards to corporate developer resources: I guess more outreach to sponsoring companies and being more persuasive. But, I'm not at all versed in the business-y side of things, so I defer to other folks on that one.
- Investigating and working on integrating OpenStack much more closely with other cloud tools. We're great for IaaS, but clouds today are not only IaaS and we need to evolve and play nice with everything else that someone might encounter in a datacenter. Mohammed brings a great point about integrating with Kubernetes. All these integrations need to be well documented, including best practices, and part of our testing infrastructure.
To summarize, I would like to see OpenStack scale better. From homelabbers or small businesses who only need a few services, to large datacenters who may be running multiple OpenStacks, multiple Kuberneteses/OpenShifts, monitoring tools, billing systems. This may result in an increase in adoption, which in turn, should result in an increase in contributions.
I can see the above becoming community goals and the TC doing outreach to document the process and help out.
On Apr 4, 2020, at 9:09 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.
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?
-gmann
On 2020-04-06 21:50:01 +0000 (+0000), Nikolla, Kristi wrote: [...]
With regards to non-corporate: You can't really contribute to a project effectively (or even feel the motivation to) if you're not using it or integrating with it in some form. All the documentation in the world is not going to help with that.
[...]
Yes, I don't see this as all that different from other open source projects, actually. Some users of your software will contribute to it when they see things which need fixing, changing or implementing. The confusion which seems to arise is that in the case of software like OpenStack, its primary users are businesses and other medium-to-large organizations, not individuals and hobbyists. And in fact some of our ancillary subprojects which are small utilities used outside these environments see contributions from more diverse sets of users. So if we want contributions from different places, what we should be asking is how do we change who uses the software.
With regards to corporate developer resources: I guess more outreach to sponsoring companies and being more persuasive. But, I'm not at all versed in the business-y side of things, so I defer to other folks on that one.
[...]
After getting feedback from the OSF BoD, hope was that the Upstream Investment Opportunities documents would help fill that gap:
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/upstream-investment-opportunit...
People generally contribute to something that they want to use. It is really as simple as that.
- Make sure that people understand what OpenStack is/does - Make OpenStack easier to use - Make OpenStack do more things - Make OpenStack components reusable
For the first three points: few people want to use something that they don't understand or that they find difficult to use or that doesn't do the things they want. For the last point: ok fine, maybe some people don't need OpenStack but one of our components might be just what they need to build their own cool thing, so why not mutually benefit?
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.
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?
-gmann
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 11:34:36 -0500 Jeremy Freudberg jeremyfreudberg@gmail.com wrote ----
People generally contribute to something that they want to use. It is really as simple as that.
- Make sure that people understand what OpenStack is/does
- Make OpenStack easier to use
- Make OpenStack do more things
- Make OpenStack components reusable
For the first three points: few people want to use something that they don't understand or that they find difficult to use or that doesn't do the things they want. For the last point: ok fine, maybe some people don't need OpenStack but one of our components might be just what they need to build their own cool thing, so why not mutually benefit?
I think all those points are valid but whats about existing users who are using them. How we can convince them to contribute back? Jay did a good job putting the clear pic on users vs contributors.
- https://governance.openstack.org/tc/user_survey/analysis-12-2019.html#to-whi...
-gmann
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.
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?
-gmann
Thanks Ghanshyam - very good point! I guess that is the role of outreach, e.g. events/meetups to bring together users and devs. Otherwise we can only lead by example, promoting stories of users who are more successful due to their active upstream participation (vs passive use).
On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 4:21 PM Ghanshyam Mann gmann@ghanshyammann.com wrote:
[...] I think all those points are valid but whats about existing users who are using them. How we can convince them to contribute back? Jay did a good job putting the clear pic on users vs contributors. [...]
On 05/04/2020 02:09, Ghanshyam Mann 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.
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?
-gmann
This has been my hobby horse for a while :)
Honestly, we need to highlight how people *using* OpenStack can contribute. As Artom correctly noted in a message above, we are pretty reliant on paid contributors, and with some of the traditional vendors pulling back we should be diversifying our reach to people who have traditionally felt it was too difficult to contribute.
Also - (and this is Graham with his personal hat on, not his TC hat) I think that any company that is a high level sponsor of the foundation, and derives value from OpenStack should be pushing resources back upstream, and not just in sponsorship money.
Some of the smaller foundation members donate not just CI resources to opendev, but also developers, and upstream contributions. This should be the done thing across all members.
As part of this, we (the TC) should be able to say to these companies where the most value would be for contribution, which is something I think we have gotten a lot better at.
---- On Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:45:30 -0500 Graham Hayes gr@ham.ie wrote ----
On 05/04/2020 02:09, Ghanshyam Mann 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.
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?
-gmann
This has been my hobby horse for a while :)
Honestly, we need to highlight how people *using* OpenStack can contribute. As Artom correctly noted in a message above, we are pretty reliant on paid contributors, and with some of the traditional vendors pulling back we should be diversifying our reach to people who have traditionally felt it was too difficult to contribute.
Also - (and this is Graham with his personal hat on, not his TC hat) I think that any company that is a high level sponsor of the foundation, and derives value from OpenStack should be pushing resources back upstream, and not just in sponsorship money.
Some of the smaller foundation members donate not just CI resources to opendev, but also developers, and upstream contributions. This should be the done thing across all members.
As part of this, we (the TC) should be able to say to these companies where the most value would be for contribution, which is something I think we have gotten a lot better at.
Yeah, I think this is the answer (one of which can practically solve this) I was looking for :).
Making users contribute resources as one of the mandatory things can solve this for sure. I do not know what is the side-effect of that. I also do not know why this cannot be implemented. Along with sponsor, we can make companies using OpenStack interop certification/logo to do the same.
I am not sure TC can reach out to companies executive layer for asking resources, but I think as TC, we can put this requirement to BoD or foundation as one of the things to consider serious notes?
-gmann
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 9:13 AM Ghanshyam Mann gmann@ghanshyammann.com wrote:
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?
I take the `make OpenStack easier to install` and `more integration with Kubernetes` the best answer I can think of. To `containerized` is the phase I plan to use here. I know we have a lot of services that can move to container but not as friendly to container as we think it is. We should at least build and test on container as possible as we can. With this, we might be able to reuse some pre-build container and save significant installation time.
I think it's also a huge missing pice that we didn't allow users to have more proper `interactive tutorial` to directly type in commands or try on the horizon like try stack. If we can't really have time to resolve that part. Maybe we should start to think a `one command` installed environment so the user can try on for the first time and without learning huge knowledge base to write devstack script. Like `openstack install`? :)
-- May The Force of OpenStack Be With You, Rico Lin irc: ricolin
On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 12:42 PM Rico Lin rico.lin.guanyu@gmail.com wrote:
[...] Maybe we should start to think a `one command` installed environment so the user can try on for the first time and without learning huge knowledge base to write devstack script. Like `openstack install`? :) [...]
I think you are describing https://microstack.run/ ? I never tried it but it looks interesting.
Should the TC maintain a reference document of simple OpenStack evaluation tools? e.g. packstack, microstack, tripleo-quickstart...?
OpenStack architect for almost 10 years putting in my two cents after stumbling across this thread searching for something else.
I think there is a missed opportunity here that isn't being addressed which is: why are companies moving away from OpenStack to begin with. The question that should be asked is not how do we revamp documentation or how to add more contributors but rather what this community can do to draw them back. By failing to attract customers with a platform technology that is easily consumable and understandable, it's akin to brainstorming new flavors of cough syrup while failing to address the underlying sickness.
To be perfectly blunt, my feeling is if the TC cannot solve for or drive towards easing/addressing OpenStack's technical challenges that drive away customers/inhibit adoption overall then I honestly question the value of having a TC in the first place. This should be central to their charter and it's my view so far they've failed in that regard.
As one who gets annoyed with criticism without alternatives, I believe we can resolve the contributor issue with some focus in a few keys areas and none of these suggestions involves trying to attract them directly:
- Prioritize a simplified installer with minimal inputs that gets a platform online on a simple form factor with minimal dependencies and an abundance of assumptions. - Revisit the charter of the TC which needs a serious rework since we should *all* be highly dissatisfied given their past tendency to maintain the status quo. - Revisit what enterprises need and how they're leveraging cloud. If we aren't listening to why folks are leaving we will continue producing increasingly-irrelevant software. Trust me, if we don't solve our problems in this regard, someone else will and OpenStack will be just another could-have-been technology that failed to watch, listen and adapt.
If we solve for *why *companies are abandoning OpenStack -- both as corporate contributors and as consumers -- getting contributors will just be a by-product of that success. But not before.
//adam
*Adam Peacock*
Principal Architect Office: +1-916-794-5706
On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 11:20 AM Jeremy Freudberg jeremyfreudberg@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 12:42 PM Rico Lin rico.lin.guanyu@gmail.com wrote:
[...] Maybe we should start to think a `one command` installed environment so
the user can
try on for the first time and without learning huge knowledge base to
write devstack script.
Like `openstack install`? :) [...]
I think you are describing https://microstack.run/ ? I never tried it but it looks interesting.
Should the TC maintain a reference document of simple OpenStack evaluation tools? e.g. packstack, microstack, tripleo-quickstart...?
participants (14)
-
Adam Peacock
-
Artom Lifshitz
-
Belmiro Moreira
-
Donny Davis
-
Ghanshyam Mann
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Graham Hayes
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Jeremy Freudberg
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Jeremy Stanley
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melanie witt
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Mohammed Naser
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Nikolla, Kristi
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Radosław Piliszek
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Rico Lin
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Sean Mooney