Open Stack

Hi everyone:

Over the past week in the summit, there was a lot of discussion
regarding StarlingX
and members of the technical commitee had a few productive discussions regarding
the best approach to deal with a proposed new pilot project for
incubation in the OSF's Edge
Computing strategic focus area: StarlingX.

If you're not aware, StarlingX includes forks of some OpenStack
components and other open source software
which contain certain features that are specific to edge and
industrial IoT computing use cases.  The code
behind the project is from Wind River (and is used to build a product
called "Titanium
Cloud").

At the moment, the goal of StarlingX hosting their projects on the
community infrastructure
is to get the developers used to the Gerrit workflow.  The intention
is to evenutally
work with upstream teams in order to bring the features and bug fixes which are
specific to the fork back upstream, with an ideal goal of bringing all
the differences
upstream.

We've discussed around all the different ways that we can approach
this and how to
help the StarlingX team be part of our community.  If we can
succesfully do this, it would
be a big success for our community as well as our community gaining
contributors from
the Wind River team.  In an ideal world, it's a win-win.

The plan at the moment is the following:
- StarlingX will have the first import of code that is not forked,
simply other software that
  they've developed to help deliver their product.  This code can be
hosted with no problems.
- StarlingX will generate a list of patches to be brought upstream and
the StarlingX team
  will work together with upstream teams in order to start backporting
and upstreaming the
  codebase.  Emilien Macchi (EmilienM) and I have volunteered to take
on the responsibility of
  monitoring the progress upstreaming these patches.
- StarlingX contains a few forks of other non-OpenStack software. The
StarlingX team will work
  with the authors of the original projects to ensure that they do not
mind us hosting a fork
  of their software.  If they don't, we'll proceed to host those
projects. If they prefer
  something else (hosting it themselves, placing it on another hosting
service, etc.),
  the StarlingX team will work with them in that way.

We discussed approaches for cases where patches aren't acceptable
upstream, because they
diverge from the project mission or aren't comprehensive. Ideally all
of those could be turned
into acceptable changes that meet both team's criteria. In some cases,
adding plugin interfaces
or driver interfaces may be the best alternative. Only as a last
resort would we retain the
forks for a long period of time.

>From what was brought up, the team from Wind River is hoping to
on-board roughly 50 new full
time contributors.  In combination with the features that they've
built that we can hopefully
upstream, I am hopeful that we can come to a win-win situation for
everyone in this.

Regards,
Mohammed