Open Stack

Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Over the last year we have seen some contraction in the number of
> companies and individuals contributing to OpenStack. At the same
> time we have started seeing contributions from other companies and
> individuals. To some degree this contraction and shift in contributor
> base is a natural outcome of changes in OpenStack itself along with
> the rest of the technology industry, but as with any change it
> raises questions about how and whether we can ensure a smooth
> transition to a new steady state.
> 
> What aspects of our policies or culture make contributing to OpenStack
> more difficult than contributing to other open source projects?
> 
> Which of those would you change, and how?

Our focus for the past 7 years was on handling the enormous growth of
the OpenStack project. If you asked me in 2010 how many total code
contributors we'd have by 2018, my answer would probably have been
closer to 700 than to 7000. We've built systems and processes to sustain
that growth, and we were very successful at it.

The issue is that systems and processes designed to sustain times of
inflation do not work so well in a deflation period, or even a
stagnation period. It's urgent now to have a critical look at them, see
what is useful and what is a scale optimization we could do away with.

Our largest reserve of potential contributors lies in the vast number of
users we have. In my opinion, one of the mistakes we made was to create
an "operators" community separate from the "developers" community,
almost in reaction to it. That makes it more difficult to smoothly
transition users into contributors and ultimately into code
contributions. Melvin and I have been busy over the past two cycles
fixing that in various ways, but there is still a lot of work to do.

> Where else should we be looking for contributors?

Like other large open source projects, OpenStack has a lot of visibility
in the academic sector. I feel like we are less successful than others
in attracting contributions from there, and we could do a lot better by
engaging with them more directly.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)