Open Stack

On 08/01/2016 03:39 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Steven Dake (stdake) wrote:
>> On 7/31/16, 11:29 AM, "Doug Hellmann" <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>> To be clear, I'm suggesting that projects with team:single-vendor be
>>> given enough time to lose that tag. That does not require them to grow
>>> diverse enough to get team:diverse-affiliation.
>>
>> That makes sense and doesn't send the wrong message.  I wasn't trying to
>> suggest that either; was just pointing out Kevin's numbers are more in
>> line with diverse-affiliation than single vendor.  My personal thoughts
>> are single vendor projects are ok in OpenStack if they are undertaking
>> community-building activities to increase their diversity of contributors.
>
> Basically my position on this is: OpenStack is about providing open
> collaboration spaces so that multiple organizations and individuals can
> collaborate (on a level playing ground) to solve a set of issues. It's
> difficult to have a requirement of a project having a diversity of
> affiliation before it can join, because of the chicken-and-egg issue
> between visibility and affiliation-diversity. So we totally accept
> single-vendor projects as official OpenStack projects.
>
> But if a project is persistently single-vendor after some time and
> nobody seems interested to join it, the technical value of that project
> being "in" OpenStack rather than a separate project in the OpenStack
> ecosystem of projects is limited. It's limited for OpenStack (why
> provide resources to support a project that is obviously only beneficial
> to one organization ?), and it's limited to the organization itself (why
> go through the OpenStack-specific open processes when you could shortcut
> it with internal tools and meetings ? why accept the oversight of the
> Technical Committee ?).

Thierry I think you underestimate the value organizations perceive they 
get from projects being in the tent. Even if a project is single vendor, 
the halo effect of OpenStack and the access to free resources (the infra 
cloud, and more importantly the world-class infra TEAM) more than make 
up for any downsides associated with following established processes.

I strongly doubt any organization would choose to remove a project from 
OpenStack for the reasons you mention. If the community doesn't want 
these kinds of projects in the big tent then the community probably 
needs to push them out.

-Ben Swartzlander


> So the idea is to find a way for projects who realize that they won't
> attract a significant share of external contributions to move to an
> externally-governed project. I'm not sure we can use a strict deadline
> -- some projects might still be single-vendor after a year but without
> structurally resisting contributions. But being able to trigger a review
> after some time, to assess if we have reasons to think it will improve
> in the future (or not), sounds like a good idea.
>