[Openstack-operators] A Hypervisor supporting containers

Clint Byrum clint at fewbar.com
Mon May 5 17:47:02 UTC 2014


Excerpts from Brad Knowles's message of 2014-05-02 10:30:47 -0700:
> On May 2, 2014, at 11:27 AM, matt <matt at nycresistor.com> wrote:
> 
> > most operators do not attend summits.
> 
> For people who do work at companies that would qualify as "operators", the only people who ever will attend summits or conferences are sales and marketing types.  Real rubber-meets-the-road operations people won't attend, unless they've been invited to speak.
> 
> At most, companies may potentially allow their employees to attend one conference or summit per year (i.e., allow them to take PTO to attend on their own dollar), and lots of things are likely to rank higher on their list of priorities than squandering that once-a-year opportunity on a summit.
> 
> 
> The only people who are likely to ever attend a conference or a summit are people who could generate sales by being there and operating the booth, or if they're new enough to the space and their company is desperate enough to send one person somewhere for a week to become the in-house "expert" on the subject.
> 
> 
> At least, that's the pattern I've seen repeated over and over again for the past 25+ years.
> 

This is the free-rider problem of Open Source in a nutshell. It cuts
both ways, it just isn't obvious how it hurts the free rider org.

If your org is small enough where one individual travelling to the
summit and being hyper focused on it for a week is too expensive, then
you're unfortunately getting left behind by the economy of scale that
drives OpenStack.

You'll spend far more resources trying to adapt your business to OpenStack
than you would have spent sending that employee to the summit to safe
guard your use cases in sessions and to help shape the future in your
favor.

I've been in orgs both large and small, and I've convinced both sizes
to send me to open source events where I can glean information, make
connections, and influence development. Travel is cheap compared to having
to work around bugs that the developers don't even know are important to
anybody.

This is not unique to OpenStack, or even Open Source. All shared
infrastructure gets dominated by those who can afford to be present in
its governance.



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