Open Stack

Matt Riedemann wrote:
> [...]
> So is the question does Nova provide a level playing field as a project
> because it has drivers that can be deployed and used and tested without
> special hardware, i.e. libvirt? Then yes. Or is it Nova doesn't provide
> a level playing field because zVM and powervm aren't in tree?

Nova provides a level playing field because there is no single company 
unfairly benefiting from Nova being an official project team. No 
specific group of developers in Nova ends up having specific powers that 
others can't have.

> If this is really just, random project wants to be considered an
> 'official' OpenStack project but is totally unusable without a
> proprietary stack to deploy and run it - which makes it completely
> vendor specific, regardless of whether or not they open sourced the
> front-end to talk to their proprietary backend, so only developers from
> said vendor can work on the project, then yeah, I agree with the
> proposed change in wording.

That's the gist of it, although I would extend that slightly beyond 
"totally unusable". If a project team is mainly formed around a piece of 
code that interacts with a proprietary hardware or software solution, 
then the developers which happen to have access to that solution, and 
can read or modify the code it runs, have an unfair advantage compared 
to other developers. Even if a 3rd-party testing solution is offered, 
that's still a blackbox which says "yes" or "no" for anyone outside the 
special group of people which happen to have access to it.

It is very likely that as a result of this tilted playing field, such a 
project team will stay single-vendor forever. This proposal is just 
saying such a project team should not be made an official OpenStack 
project team -- all those we bless need to be reasonably-level playing 
fields.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)