Open Stack

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016, Jim Meyer wrote:
>> On Feb 5, 2016, at 9:54 AM, Tim Bell <Tim.Bell at cern.ch> wrote:
>> The scale could be defined on the basis of the survey data. The
>> reference implementation should be able to address at least X% of
>> deployments. I can think of at least one project which was not
>> suitable for use at a reasonable size configuration and not being
>> able to demonstrate this would have saved a lot of grief in the ops
>> community as well as ensuring the project addressed the issue early.
>
> +1 and I can think of more than one. =\

Observing this thread and "the trouble with names"[1] one I get
concerned that we're trending in the direction of expecting
projects/servers/APIs to be done and perfect before they will ever
be OpenStack. This, of course, runs entirely contrary to the spirit
of open source where people release a solution to their itch and
people join with them to make it better.

If we start thinking of projects as needing to have "production-grade"
implementations and APIs as needing to be stable and correct from
the start we're backing ourselves into corners that are very difficult
to get out of, distracting ourselves from the questions we ought to be
asking, and putting barriers in the way of doing new but necessary
stuff and evolving.

In the case of Poppy I think we should be asking questions which
can't be answered with heuristics. We have to use humans.

1 Does it satisfy a need that needs to be satisfied?
2 Is the team involved of good intent? Are they capable of building
   something good, even if they haven't yet.
3 Is the tool (or intended tool) usable and useful without buying
   something you'd have to buy anyway (we all have to buy computers
   and networks) or putting the buyer in an untenable license violation?
4 Is the tool something that belongs in OpenStack?

Number 3 is the real topic of this thread. I'd argue that software
that uses a _service_ that is non-free does not make the software
non-free. Gating is certainly an issue but I think that is addressed
by my next point, about number 4.

While the big tent is nice in that it allows lots of people to use
the excellent OpenStack infrastructure it's diffusing the meaning of
what OpenStack is. We should be asking ourselves if something like
Poppy needs to be in OpenStack in order for it to be useful (and for
OpenStack to be better). Would Poppy be more useful to
more people if it were something that happens to work with OpenStack
but doesn't need OpenStack?

OpenStack is a type of meat and Poppy is perhaps a type of sauce.
OpenStack tastes good with Poppy on it, but it also taste good with
other types of sauce. Other types of meat may also taste good with
Poppy on it.

We shouldn't make Poppy "OpenStack" if it can be good sauce for lots of
meats. And we shouldn't make Poppy "OpenStack" because we need to make
more sure that the meat we've already got tastes good and doesn't
cause "hate" in user survey reactions.

By opening the flaps of the big tent wide we're opening ourselves up to
a lot of questions and debates that we don't necessarily have to have if
we keep ourselves focused more keenly on a limited vision of OpenStack.
And we're helping to keep the wide open source ecosystem healthy (where
the stuff under the tent works well with the rest of the world by virtue
of being a part of it rather than a separate something that is growing
to consume everything it needs). The tent doesn't have to cover
everything.

[1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-February/085748.html
-- 
Chris Dent               (¨s¡ã¡õ¡ã)¨s¦à©ß©¥©ß            http://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent