Open Stack

Excerpts from gordon chung's message of 2017-06-15 18:56:22 +0000:
> 
> On 15/06/17 02:05 PM, Davanum Srinivas wrote:
> > Example from https://www.meetup.com/openstack/events/237621777/
> > "Platform9 recently open-sourced Project Mors and VM HA as part of the
> > OpenStack Big Tent initiative."
> 
> ah i see, i imagine you could correct those who are corporate sponsors 
> (and send in the suits for those who aren't. j/k).
> 
> it seems like we want to drop "big tent" because marketers ruined it but 
> i'm still not sure we've formalised why we need a replacement (not 
> saying we don't).
> 

One of the *most* common complaints the TC gets from outside the
contributor community is that people do not understand what projects
are part of OpenStack and what parts are not. We have a clear
definition of that in our minds (the projects that have said they
want to be part of OpenStack, and agreed to put themselves under
TC governance, with all of the policies that implies). That definition
is so trivial to say, that it seems like a tautology.  However,
looking in from the outside of the community, that definition isn't
helpful.

We are very open with our hosting, allowing projects that have not
yet, and may never, sign up to be governed by the TC to use our
infrastructure services. We expect them to be related in some way,
but we have even imported projects when we've taken over maintenance
(several Oslo libs fall into this category, as do a few others like
mox3 and sqlalchemy-migrate). With the move away from stackforge,
and other changes in that hosting (that were made for good reasons
to make the infra team's lives easier and to make it simpler for a
project to join the set of governed projects), we have removed most
of the other technical signals about which projects are in that
"official" list and which are not.  We did not at the same time
remove all of the people in the world who want to understand what
is, and what is not, "in" OpenStack.

So, we need to find a way to answer that question. As Thierry said,
one way is to have 2 names to describe the 2 states. Big Tent used
to be one such name, except that we have learned that term was
unclear to a bunch of people (insert joke about how hard naming
things can be here).

Other communities don't seem to have this problem, because they either
don't host projects that are not part of their umbrella, or they don't
have projects moving in and out of governance so often.

And for the record, from the TC's perspective, being a governed
project has nothing to do with whether the participants are sponsors
of the foundation. The minute it does, I will step down. As part
of continuing to have a healthy community, we want to attract new
members, regardless of whether they are coming with money (and in
fact being an individual member is free).  We look at whether
projects (a) ask to be and (b) follow the guidelines we've set down.
We do look at who is contributing, but only when we consider the
various team diversity tags, none of which are required to be a
governed project.

Doug