[openstack-dev] [tc] persistently single-vendor projects

Erno Kuvaja ekuvaja at redhat.com
Thu Aug 4 17:15:34 UTC 2016


On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 9:56 AM, Duncan Thomas <duncan.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 August 2016 at 18:14, Adrian Otto <adrian.otto at rackspace.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am struggling to understand why we would want to remove projects from
>> our big tent at all, as long as they are being actively developed under the
>> principles of "four opens". It seems to me that working to disqualify such
>> projects sends an alarming signal to our ecosystem. The reason we made the
>> big tent to begin with was to set a tone of inclusion. This whole discussion
>> seems like a step backward. What problem are we trying to solve, exactly?
>
>
> Any project existing in the big tent sets a significant barrier (policy,
> technical, mindshare) of entry to any competing project that might spring
> up. The cost of entry as an individual into a single-vendor project is much
> higher in general than a diverse one (back-channel communications,
> differences in vision, monoculture, commercial pressures, etc), and so
> having a non-diverse project in the big tent reduces the possibilities of a
> better replacement appearing.
>

Actually I couldn't disagree more. Since big tent and stackforge move
under the openstack name space the effect has been exactly the
opposite. Competitors have way less needs to collaborate with each
other to be part of OpenStack as anyone could just kick up their own
project and do it in their way still being part of the
community/ecosystem/what-ever-you-want-to-call-it.

We see projects splitting more when they do not share the core
concepts (which is good thing) but we do not see projects combining
their efforts when they do overlapping things. Maybe we do see this
lack of diversity just growing as long as we don't care about it (tag
here, another there is not going to slow the company behind the
project pushing it to their customers even there was more diverse or
better options, it's still part of OpenStack and it's "ours"). If we
start pushing the projects that are single vendor out of the big tent,
we give more pressure for multiple of those to combine their efforts
rather than continue competing for same thing and if they don't want
to play together I don't see anything wrong to send clear message that
we don't want to share the cost of it.

I personally see the proposed as not limiting the competition to
appear but rather the single-vendor competition might not stick around
when the competing projects would be under a threat to be thrown out.
If someone brings competing project into the ecosystem, 18 months is
also pretty decent time to see if that approach is superior enough (to
attract the diversity) and justify it's existence or if those people
just should try to play with others instead of doing their own thing.

I'm all for the selective inclusion based on meritocracy, not only on
person level, but on project level as well.

- Erno

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