Open Stack

On Tue, 2015-05-05 at 10:45 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Joe Gordon wrote:
> > [...]
> > To tackle this I would like to propose the idea of a periodic developer
> > oriented newsletter, and if we agree to go forward with this, hopefully
> > the foundation can help us find someone to write newsletter.
> 
> I've been discussing the idea of a "LWN" for OpenStack for some time,
> originally with Mark McLoughlin. For those who don't know it, LWN
> (lwn.net) is a source of quality tech reporting on Linux in general (and
> the kernel in particular). It's written by developers and tech reporters
> and funded by subscribers.
> 
> An LWN-like OpenStack development newsletter would provide general
> status, dive into specific features, report on specific
> talks/conferences, summarize threads etc. It would be tremendously
> useful to the development community.
> 
> The issue is, who can write such content ? It is a full-time job to
> produce authored content, you can't just copy (or link to) content
> produced elsewhere. It takes a very special kind of individual to write
> such content: the person has to be highly technical, able to tackle any
> topic, and totally connected with the OpenStack development community.
> That person has to be cross-project and ideally have already-built
> legitimacy.

Here, you're being overly restrictive.  Lwn.net isn't staffed by top
level kernel maintainers (although it does solicit the occasional
article from them).  It's staffed by people who gained credibility via
their insightful reporting rather than by their contributions.  I see no
reason why the same model wouldn't work for OpenStack.

There is one technical difference: in the kernel, you can get all the
information from the linux-kernel (and other mailing list) firehose if
you're skilled enough to extract it.  With OpenStack, openstack-dev
isn't enough so you have to do other stuff as well, but that's more or
less equivalent to additional research.

>  It's basically the kind of profile every OpenStack company
> is struggling and fighting to hire. And that rare person should not
> really want to spend that much time developing (or become CTO of a
> startup) but prefer to write technical articles about what happens in
> OpenStack development. I'm not sure such a person exists. And a
> newsletter actually takes more than one such person, because it's a lot
> of work (even if not weekly).

That's a bit pessimistic: followed to it's logical conclusion it would
say that lwn.net can't exist either ... which is a bit of a
contradiction.

> So as much as I'd like this to happen, I'm not convinced it's worth
> getting excited unless we have clear indication that we would have
> people willing and able to pull it off. The matter of who pays the bill
> is secondary -- I just don't think the profile exists.
> 
> For the matter, I tried to push such an idea in the past and couldn't
> find anyone to fit the rare profile I think is needed to succeed. All
> the people I could think of had other more interesting things to do. I
> don't think things changed -- but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Um, I assume you've thought of this already, but have you tried asking
lwn.net?  As you say above, they already fit the profile.  Whether they
have the bandwidth is another matter, but I believe their Chief Editor
(Jon Corbet) may welcome a broadening of the funding base, particularly
if the OpenStack foundation were offering seed funding for the
endeavour.

James