Open Stack

On 03/02/2014 07:10 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 03/01/2014 06:30 PM, John Griffith wrote:
>> Hey,
>> 
>> I just wanted to send out a quick note on a topic that came up
>> recently. Unfortunately the folks that I'd like to read this
>> most; don't participate on the ML typically, but I'd at least
>> like to raise some community awareness.
>> 
>> We all know OpenStack is growing at a rapid pace and has a lot
>> of promise, so much so that there's an enormous field of vendors
>> and OS distributions that are focusing a lot of effort and
>> marketing on the project.
>> 
>> Something that came up recently in the Cinder project is that one
>> of the backend device vendors wasn't happy with a feature that
>> somebody was working on and contributed a patch for.  Instead of
>> providing a meaningful review and suggesting alternatives to the
>> patch they set up meetings with other vendors leaving the active
>> members of the community out and picked things apart in their own
>> format out of the public view. Nobody from the core Cinder team
>> was involved in these discussions or meetings (at least that I've
>> been made aware of).
>> 
>> I don't want to go into detail about who, what, where etc at this
>> point. I instead, I want to point out that in my opinion this is
>> no way to operate in an Open Source community.  Collaboration is
>> one thing, but ambushing other peoples work is entirely
>> unacceptable in my opinion. OpenStack provides a plethora of ways
>> to participate and voice your opinion, whether it be this mailing
>> list, the IRC channels which are monitored daily and also host a
>> published weekly meeting for most projects.  Of course when in
>> doubt you're welcome to send me an email at any time with
>> questions or concerns that you have about a patch.  In any case
>> however the proper way to address concerns about a submitted
>> patch is to provide a review for that patch.
> 
> Honestly, while I realize you don't want to name names, I actually
> want to know about bad actors in our community. Because I think
> that if bad actors aren't exposed, then they tend to keep up the
> bad behavior.
Yes they do. They also tend to cargo cult one another's behaviour so
poor behaviour begats poor behaviour, in some instances because those
caught up in it believe this is the expected method of conducting
business.
> 
> Social pressure is important here.
Yes it is, if nothing else to share the foundational understanding of
opensource, what it means and how it functions. Some in the vendor
space operate from a perspective that opensource is merely a license
and once copy/pasting it to the top of a file give it no more thought,
do the detriment of those embracing opensource values.

I share this wiki link hoping others will also promote referencing of
open source material more frequently. I am sure there are better
references. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
> 
>> Everybody has a voice and the ability to participate, and the
>> most effective way to do that is by thorough, timely and
>> constructive code reviews.
>> 
>> I'd also like to point out that while a number of companies and
>> vendors have fancy taglines like "The Leaders of OpenStack",
>> they're not. OpenStack is a community effort, as of right now
>> there is no company that leads or runs OpenStack.
Thank you for stating this. For me, this deserves emphasis.

Thanks,
Anita.

>> If you have issues or concerns on the development side you need
>> to take those up with the development community, not vendor xyz.
> 
> +1
> 
> -Sean
> 
> 
> 
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