Open Stack

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 9:50 AM, Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Sep 23, 2014, at 8:40 AM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
>
> > If we are no longer incubating *programs*, which are the teams of people
> who we would like to ensure are involved in OpenStack governance, then how
> do we make that decision? From a practical standpoint, how do we make a
> list of eligible voters for a TC election? Today we pull a list of
> committers from the git history from the projects associated with “official
> programs", but if we are dropping “official programs” we need some other
> way to build the list.
>
> Joe Gordon mentioned an interesting idea to address this (which I am
> probably totally butchering), which is that we make incubation more similar
> to the ASF Incubator. In other words make it more lightweight with no
> promise of governance or infrastructure support.
>

you only slightly butchered it :). From what I gather the Apache Software
Foundation primary goals are to:

"
* provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development
projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure
* create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can
donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the
public benefit
* provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal
suits directed at the Foundation's projects
* protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from
being abused by other organizations
"[0]

This roughly translates into: JIRA, SVN, Bugzilla and Confluence etc.
for infrastructure resources. So ASF provides infrastructure, legal
support, a trademark and some basic oversight.


"The [Apache] incubator is responsible for:
* filtering the proposals about the creation of a new project or sub-project
* help the creation of the project and the infrastructure that it needs to
operate
* supervise and mentor the incubated community in order for them to reach
an open meritocratic environment
* evaluate the maturity of the incubated project, either promoting it to
official project/ sub-project status or by retiring it, in case of failure.

It must be noted that the incubator (just like the board) does not perform
filtering on the basis of technical issues. This is because the foundation
respects and suggests variety of technical approaches. It doesn't fear
innovation or even internal confrontation between projects which overlap in
functionality." [1]

So my idea, which is very similar to Monty's, is to make move all the
non-layer 1 projects into something closer to an ASF model where there is
still incubation and graduation. But the only things a project receives out
of this process is:

* Legal support
* A trademark
* Mentorship
* Infrastructure to use
* Basic oversight via the incubation/graduation process with respect to the
health of the community.

They do not get:

* Required co-gating or integration with any other projects
* People to right there docs for them, etc.
* Technical review/oversight
* Technical requirements
* Evaluation on how the project fits into a bigger picture
* Language requirements
* etc.

Note: this is just an idea, not a fully formed proposal

[0] http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#what
[1] http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#incubator


>
> It is also interesting to consider that we may not need much governance
> for things outside of layer1. Of course, this may be dancing around the
> actual problem to some extent, because there are a bunch of projects that
> are not layer1 that are already a part of the community, and we need a
> solution that includes them somehow.
>
> Vish
>
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