Open Stack

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 9:53 AM, James Bottomley <
James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

++.  I have a hunch that like many things (in OpenStack) if you make a
space for people to step up,  they will.


>
> 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
>
>
>
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