Open Stack

[BTW I hope it's not considered off-bounds for those of us who aren't
TC election candidates to reply within these campaign question threads
to responses from the candidates - but if so, let me know and I'll
shut up ;-) ]

Zhipeng Huang <zhipengh512 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Culture wise, being too IRC-centric is definitely not helping, from my own
>experience getting new Cyborg developer joining our weekly meeting from
>China. Well we could always argue it is part of a open source/hacker
>culture and preferable to commercial solutions that have the constant risk
>of suddenly being shut down someday. But as OpenStack becomes more
>commercialized and widely adopted, we should be aware that more and more
>(potential) contributors will come from the groups who are used to
>non-strictly open source environment, such as product develop team which
>relies on a lot of "closed source" but easy to use softwares.
>
>The change ? Use more video conferences, and more commercial tools that
>preferred in certain region. Stop being allergic to non-open source
>softwares and bring more capable but not hacker culture inclined
>contributors to the community.

I respectfully disagree :-)

>I know this is not a super welcomed stance in the open source hacker
>culture. But if we want OpenStack to be able to sustain more developers and
>not have a mid-life crisis then got fringed, we need to start changing the
>hacker mindset.

I think that "the hacker mindset" is too ambiguous and generalized a
concept to be useful in framing justification for change.  From where
I'm standing, the hacker mindset is a wonderful and valuable thing
which should be preserved.

However, if that conflicts with other goals of our community, such as
reducing barrier to entry, then yes that is a valid concern.  In that
case we should examine in more detail the specific aspects of hacker
culture which are discouraging potential new contributors, and try to
fix those, rather than jumping to the assumption that we should
instead switch to commercial tools.  Given the community's "Four
Opens" philosophy and strong belief in the power of Open Source, it
would be inconsistent to abandon our preference for Open Source tools.

For example, proprietary tools such as Slack are not popular because
they are proprietary; they are popular because they have a very
intuitive interface and convenient features which people enjoy.  So
when examining the specific question "What can we do to make it easier
for OpenStack newbies to communicate with the existing community over
a public instant messaging system?", the first question should not be
"Should we switch to a proprietary tool?", but rather "Is there an
open source tool which provides enough of the functionality we need?"

And in fact in the case of instant messaging, I believe the answer is
yes, as I previously pointed out:

    http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-sigs/2018-March/000332.html

Similarly, there are plenty of great Open Source solutions for voice
and video communications.

I'm all for changing with the times and adapting workflows to harness
the benefits of more modern tools, but I think it's wrong to
automatically assume that this can only be achieved via proprietary
solutions.