[openstack-dev] [all] [tc] "No Open Core" in 2016

Thomas Goirand zigo at debian.org
Sat Feb 6 04:11:08 UTC 2016


On 02/05/2016 06:57 PM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Even before OpenStack had a name, our "Four Opens" principles were
> created to define how we would operate as a community. The first open,
> "Open Source", added the following precision: "We do not produce 'open
> core' software". What does this mean in 2016 ?
> 
> Back in 2010 when OpenStack was started, this was a key difference with
> the other open source cloud platform (Eucalyptus) which was following an
> Open Core strategy with a crippled community edition and an "enterprise
> version". OpenStack was then the property of a single entity
> (Rackspace), so giving strong signals that we would never follow such a
> strategy was essential to form a real community.
> 
> Fast-forward today, the open source project is driven by a non-profit
> independent Foundation, which could not even do an "enterprise edition"
> if it wanted to. However, member companies build "enterprise products"
> on top of the Apache-licensed upstream project. And we have drivers that
> expose functionality in proprietary components. So what does it mean to
> "not do open core" in 2016 ? What is acceptable and what's not ? It is
> time for us to refresh this.
> 
> My personal take on that is that we can draw a line in the sand for what
> is acceptable as an official project in the upstream OpenStack open
> source effort. It should have a fully-functional, production-grade open
> source implementation. If you need proprietary software or a commercial
> entity to fully use the functionality of a project or getting serious
> about it, then it should not be accepted in OpenStack as an official
> project. It can still live as a non-official project and even be hosted
> under OpenStack infrastructure, but it should not be part of
> "OpenStack". That is how I would interpret "no open core" in OpenStack
> 2016.
> 
> Of course, the devil is in the details, especially around what I mean by
> "fully-functional" and "production-grade". Is it just an API/stability
> thing, or does performance/scalability come into account ? There will
> always be some subjectivity there, but I think it's a good place to start.
> 
> Comments ?

As I understand, Poppy a kind of middleware that does network access (an
"wrapper API"), right? This is comparable to let's say Pidgin, which
accesses proprietary services like Google talk, Yahoo messenger and
such. I have no problem with such a software, which I consider
completely free, even if they access a non-opened reverse engineered
network protocol.

The problem, to me, is different. It is more related to what kind of
value Poppy brings to OpenStack as a whole. And to me, that's where the
problem is. It's very low value, because its area is very far from what
we do: bring a fully open cloud. And Poppy only publishes to external
(commercial) service providers, it doesn't publish things within let's
say a multi-datacenter OpenStack deployment through a VM image it would use.

Moreover, its requirement of Cassandra DB is a no-go (this has already
been discussed in another thread: Cassandra doesn't work well on OpenJDK
at all, which makes it non-free as it requires a Java interpreter which
is non-free itself). If I had to upload Poppy to Debian, it would be
uploaded to contrib (which is the area where free software requiring
non-free software to run or be built are uploaded). Contrib isn't
officially part of Debian.

So, to accept Poppy, IMHO, it would have to:
1/ Get away from Cassandra and use a db driver which is truly free. The
"Your own DB provider here" in the README.rst is not satisfying enough,
and another db provider *must* be promoted to 1st class citizen.
2/ Puppy *must* permit to use OpenStack deployments only across multiple
datacenters (multiple regions?) and be completely useful without the
need of external resources.

Until these 2 issues aren't solved, I see no point in accepting Poppy
under the big tent, even if I consider Poppy itself fully free-software
(and not open-core as Thierry wrote).

The above points 1 and 2 are solvable, and maybe the authors will want
to do something about it.

I hope this helps,
Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)




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