Open Stack

On 12/13/2013 03:50 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Russell Bryant wrote:
>> $ git shortlog -s -e | sort -n -r
>>     172	John Wood <john.wood at rackspace.com>
>>     150	jfwood <john.wood at rackspace.com>
>>      65	Douglas Mendizabal <douglas.mendizabal at rackspace.com>
>>      39	Jarret Raim <jarret.raim at rackspace.com>
>>      17	Malini K. Bhandaru <malini.k.bhandaru at intel.com>
>>      10	Paul Kehrer <paul.l.kehrer at gmail.com>
>>      10	Jenkins <jenkins at review.openstack.org>
>>       8	jqxin2006 <jqxin2006 at gmail.com>
>>       7	Arash Ghoreyshi <arashghoreyshi at gmail.com>
>>       5	Chad Lung <chad.lung at gmail.com>
>>       3	Dolph Mathews <dolph.mathews at gmail.com>
>>       2	John Vrbanac <john.vrbanac at rackspace.com>
>>       1	Steven Gonzales <stevendgonzales at gmail.com>
>>       1	Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com>
>>       1	Bryan D. Payne <bdpayne at acm.org>
>>
>> It appears to be an effort done by a group, and not an individual.  Most
>> commits by far are from Rackspace, but there is at least one non-trivial
>> contributor (Malini) from another company (Intel), so I think this is OK.
> If you remove Jenkins and attach Paul Kehrer, jqxin2006 (Michael Xin),
> Arash Ghoreyshi, Chad Lung and Steven Gonzales to Rackspace, then the
> picture is:
>
> 67% of commits come from a single person (John Wood)
> 96% of commits come from a single company (Rackspace)
>
> I think that's a bit brittle: if John Wood or Rackspace were to decide
> to place their bets elsewhere, the project would probably die instantly.
> I would feel more comfortable if a single individual didn't author more
> than 50% of the changes, and a single company didn't sponsor more than
> 80% of the changes.
>
> Personally I think that's a large enough group to make up a Program and
> gain visibility, but a bit too fragile to enter incubation just now.
>
Thierry,

It is important to point out that in the case of Heat, almost all of the 
Heat commits prior to incubation came from Red Hat.  The team was 
diverse, with each of the original core team contributing about 20% of 
the commits.  But that has significantly changed - now there are commits 
from all over the place and our core team has grown to many folks 
outside of Red Hat.

The Heat community is much more resilient today then it was in the past, 
which is the point multiple contributors/companies bring.  But what 
brought about this resilience was incubation.  If the mission of the 
project matches OpenStack, I'd suggest allowing for incubation and see 
what happens.

Incubation brings all kinds of goodness to a project.  Few companies are 
willing to commit engineering talent to work on an OpenStack project 
until it has entered incubation.  I spent countless hours on the phone 
trying to get devs to commit to working on heat prior to incubation, and 
it was a nearly impossible task - managers at companies just didn't want 
to commit people to work on speculative R&D.

IIRC, there is a way for a project to *exit* incubation if it falls 
apart.  We should not be afraid of an incubated project failing and 
exiting via this already defined (but never used) path.

In this particular case, I believe Barbican is not ready for incubation 
because of their dependence on celery, but ultimately I don't make the 
decision :)

Regards
-steve