Open Stack

Excerpts from Sean Dague's message of 2013-12-19 04:14:51 -0800:
> On 12/19/2013 12:10 AM, Mike Perez wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Mike Perez <thingee at gmail.com
> > <mailto:thingee at gmail.com>> wrote:
> <snip>
> > I reviewed the TC meeting notes, and my question still stands.
> > 
> > It seems the committee is touching on the point of there being a worry
> > because if 
> > it's a single company running the show, they can pull resources away and
> > the 
> > project collapses. My worry is just having one company attempting to
> > design solutions 
> > to use cases that work for them, will later not work for those potential
> > companies that would 
> > provide contributors.
> > 
> > -Mike Perez
> 
> Which is our fundamental chicken and egg problem. The Barbican team has
> said they've reached out to other parties, who have expressed interest
> in joining, but no one else has.
> 
> The Heat experience shows that a lot of the time companies won't kick in
> resources until there is some kind of stamp of general approval.
> 

I want to confirm this specific case. I joined the TripleO effort just
about a year ago. We needed an orchestration tool. If Heat hadn't been
in incubation we would have considered all other options. Because it
was incubated, even though some others might have been more or less
attractive, there was no question we would lend our efforts to Heat.

Had we just decided to build our own, or try to enhance Ansible or
salt-cloud, we'd have likely had to abandon that effort as Heat improved
beyond their scope in the context of managing OpenStack API's.

> If you showed up early, with a commitment to work openly, the fact that
> the project maps to your own use cases really well isn't a bug, it's a
> feature. I don't want to hold up a team from incubating because other
> people stayed on the sidelines. That was actually exactly what was going
> on with Heat, where lots of entities thought they would keep that side
> of the equation proprietary, or outside of OpenStack. By bringing Heat
> in, we changed the equation, I think massively for the better.
> 

Right, contributing to a project that is already part of
OpenStack means you don't have to have _another_ conversation with
management/legal/etc. about contributing to _another_ OpenSource project
with slightly different governance/licensing/affiliation. An
organization can align its strategy around OpenStack, earn influence on
the board/TC/dev teams/etc.

So when it is time to open source something as part of that, the org can,
I hope, count on OpenStack to welcome them and shout to the world that
there is a new "X" in town and everybody else should take a good long
look at it and consider dropping their own "X" in favor of contributing
to this one.