Open Stack

On Tue, 15 Mar 2016, Markus Zoeller wrote:
> Chris Dent <cdent+os at anticdent.org> wrote on 03/15/2016 03:23:42 PM:
>> My take is that if we do have that level of friction then influence, in
>> its many forms, will solely be mediated by the vendors that consume the
>> upstream OpenStack community, or people who have the wherewithal to
>> become embedded in the community. Is that fully healthy?
>
> I don't understand this, could you rephrase it please?

Just for an example:

Say I'm a hobbyist in the basement who has just installed openstack
using whatever combination of packages, puppet, chef, ansible,
trunk, sheer grit, whatever on my spare hardware because I want to
know how it all works. After some effort I get it working, start
using it, and find some issues. Those issues come in two forms:

* What would be described by reasonable folk as a bug ("I do some api
   request and get a 500, really I should get a 4xx"). I report that
   to launchpad with a replication scenario, eventually somebody comes
   along, sees an actionable bug and fixes it, thanks me for the
   clear MTC.

* I get used to using things and realize that for a particular use
   case it would be useful to be able to express it more clearly. I
   report that to launchpad with a description of the idea and how it
   fits in to the world. It gets closed as wishlist with a bump to
   the backlog specs. I'm just a guy in the basement, I can't be
   bothered with going to the trouble of making a commit, I guess my
   ideas aren't that important.

Meanwhile, fortune 500 company chrisshoe, inc.[2] has contracted with
Hbirahat, the new consolidated enterprise OpenStack company, for a few
millions dollars worth of help on their new private cloud. While
working on that the professionals involved have realized they need a
particular feature. Hbirahat has a lot of people involved in
OpenStack[1], so no problem, we'll just get one of the cores in the
related project to write a spec, massage it through.

Turns out that idea from chrisshoe, inc. was in the same area as the one
that me in the basement had, except mine was several months earlier. And
while the chrisshoe solution is oriented towards easing private clouds
for enterprises, mine was for easing experimental clouds for people in
the basement. I could have spent the day not just writing up the backlog
spec, but also first of all figuring out _how_ to write a backlog spec.
Instead I just went about my original goal because meh.

You could argue that I (in the basement) just didn't care enough
and if I did I would have scratched my itch. That would be entirely
fair in many open source projects and may even be in this one. But
there's an extent to which the leverage that a monied corporation
can exercise in the OpenStack environment is a bit ... disconcerting.

It makes it seem like that for individual contributors we may want
to grease the pathways of contribution to compensate for the
advantages that the corporate behemoths have. I, unfortunately, don't
have any immediate ideas on how that might be done in the face our
pre-existing situation.

[1] All of them, pretty much, because of the industry consolidation.
[2] Makers of comfy shoes for comfy folk.
-- 
Chris Dent               (¨s¡ã¡õ¡ã)¨s¦à©ß©¥©ß            http://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent