Open Stack

On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 7:16 AM, Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote:
> The general statement of "people care more about features than
> usability/stability" gets thrown around a lot. And gets lots of head
> nodding. But rarely comes with specifics.

I think a lot of this general sentiment comes from watching what gets
the investment from contributors, specifically from contributing
companies.  HP may have been an aberration for a time given the
quantity of infra folk they once employed, but take a look at the
distribution between feature work and non-feature work that our major
contributing companies sponsor.

Maybe it is time to set up direct sponsorship for some of this work
that keeps coming up as important but "nobody wants to pay for it".
Like an endowed chair or just a GoFundMe that lets someone continue to
be the Stable Branch Overlord.  It is the sort of work that no single
company wants to be on the hook for, nor is it a good idea from the
community perspective to be single sourced in that regard (again, the
infra situation last fall) so lets make it easy for downstream
consumers to share the funding of the upstream work they all want to
see done but do not want or can not afford the responsibility of
taking on themselves.

You might say we already do this, the Foundation employs people to
work directly on these things, and yes they do to great effect.  But
this topic keeps coming up because it is a specific request for
specific OpenStack consumers.  Lets help them help themselves.

dt

-- 

Dean Troyer
dtroyer at gmail.com