Open Stack

Heh. And some things don't change...

Having a large project such as OpenStack, made up of large numbers of volunteers, each with their own desires means it will be impossible to make everyone happy all of the time.

For the good of the community, the community needs to decide on a common direction, and sometimes individuals need to be asked to go against their own desires for the betterment of the entire community. Yes, that risks an individual contributor leaving. But if it really is in the best interest of the community, others will continue on.

We've ignored that for so long, we've built a huge system on letting individuals set their own course without common direction and with their own desires. The projects don't integrate as well as they should, the whole of OpenStack gets overly complex and unwieldy to use or worse, large gaps in user needed functionality, and users end up leaving.

I'm really sure at this point that you can't have a project as large as OpenStack without leadership setting a course and sometimes making hard choices for the betterment of the whole. That doesn't mean a benevolent dictator. But our self govened model with elected officials should be a good balance. If they are too unreasonable, they don't get reelected. But not leading isn't an option either anymore.

Thanks,
Kevin
________________________________________
From: Jeremy Stanley [fungi at yuggoth.org]
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2018 9:53 AM
To: OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [all] [nova] [placement] placement below or beside compute after extraction?

On 2018-08-21 16:38:41 +0000 (+0000), Fox, Kevin M wrote:
[...]
> You need someone like the TC to be able to step in, in those cases
> to help sort that kind of issue out. In the past, the TC was not
> willing to do so. My gut feeling though is that is finally
> changing.
[...]

To be clear, it's not that TC members are unwilling to step into
these discussions. Rather, it's that most times when a governing
body has to tell volunteers to do something they don't want to do,
it tends to not be particularly helpful in solving the underlying
disagreement.
--
Jeremy Stanley