[Openstack-sigs] [meta] How SIG work gets done?

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Sun Jul 16 17:15:14 UTC 2017


On 2017-07-16 11:51:21 -0500 (-0500), Melvin Hillsman wrote:
> Observation: One typical concern voiced regarding a requirement
> from a working group/team, organization, deployer, end-user, etc
> is that there are no guarantees for requirements to even be
> considered let alone being implemented. Comments regarding this
> generally center around developers will work on what they are paid
> to work on. This assumes something that may be pushing more folks
> away at times and that is a) we have a paywall or pay-to-play
> model, b) we do not/have not had any folks contributing out of the
> spirit of open-source, and c) if you are a small IT shop you have
> no chance of being heard.
[...]

It's worth noting that voicing requirements without actually doing
most of the work to implement them yourself is also not in "the
spirit of open source." The root of open source inertia is
user-contributors scratching their own itches, not putting together
feature wishlists in hopes someone else will do the work for you.
Sometimes if enough users want a feature, someone with no use for
that feature themselves may still implement it for them for the fun
of it, for the challenge, for the gratification that comes from
building something others find useful... but that sort of
volunteerism is not commonplace and definitely not the sort of
behavior anyone should come to expect of someone else.

The incentives at play in free software are mostly still the same
incentives which drive other typical psychological/sociological
patterns in human society. As is the case with just about anything,
if you want something done right (or even at all sometimes) in
OpenStack you need to do it yourself... and that's why SIGs probably
need to be at least 50% comprised of people who will actually be
implementing the things the SIG members want to see, or else those
things ultimately won't happen.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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