Open Stack

On Sat, 2014-03-01 at 16:30 -0700, 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.
> 
> 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.  If you have issues or concerns
> on the development side you need to take those up with the development
> community, not vendor xyz.

+100

And another +1 for use of the word plethora.

I will point out -- not knowing who these actors were -- that sometimes
it is tough for some folks to adapt to open community methodologies and
open discussions. Some people simply don't know any other way of
resolving differences other than to work in private or develop what they
consider to be "consensus" between favored parties in order to drive
"change by bullying". We must, as a community, both make it clear
(through posts such as this) that this behavior is antithetical to how
the OpenStack community functions, and also provide these individuals
with as much assistance as possible in changing their long-practiced
habits. Some stick. Some carrot.

Best,
-jay