Open Stack

On Sun, 16 Jul 2017, Jeremy Stanley wrote:

> 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.

I agree 100% with your conclusion that sigs need to (at least
eventually) include the people who will be doing implementation.

However, I think it is disingenuous to expect that free and/or open
source software physics plays a large part in the development of
OpenStack. Not simply because most of the developers are paid (well
paid in the grand scheme of things) to be here, nor merely because
many find they must leave when they no longer have an employer who
will sponsor their presence, nor because significant chunks of the
developers do not actively work (although some do) on clouds on a
day to day basis (so couldn't legitimately be said to be scratching an
itch), nor because the ability to have influence and make change is
often highly reliant on being willing and able to show up day in and
day out (not just on those days when you have an itch), nor because
many of the people who do have some license to choose what they do
in this environment choose not what they want to but what they feel
must be done. It is all of those things and more.

OpenStack is a commercial enterprise to collaboratively develop a
suite of software with an open license. And that's great.

But it means the physics of getting things done are not as simple
and hackneyed as people like to claim. I think it is perfectly
legitimate for people to form a group around a special interest,
for that interest to be important, and in the absence of available
people to work on it seek assistance finding those resources.

With luck, because of the apparent obviousness of importance of the
need, people will gather around it. Sometimes that doesn't
happen. That's going to be normal because of the different
physics, so we need additional strategies.

Things like community goals and the top 5 list driven by the TC can
help. But sometimes the needs are not visible to them and the needy
group is left out in the cold and has unanswered requests.

In the past those requests have sometimes been directed to PTLs and
the TC. Projects are already overwhelmed and have been so for
years, playing a constant game of catchup or desperately trying to
stay afloat in the face of decreasing resources. In our current
commercial environment going to the projects is probably the wrong
place to go. Should they go to the corporate members of the board?

We've heard arguments that OpenStack will not be able to rely on
corporate largesse in the future and needs to come up with ways to
be more driven by users and operators. That's all well and good and
something we should strive for for other reasons than economics.
While corporate entities are still making a pile of money off
selling OpenStack-based products and services, I think there's still
plenty of room for SIGs to make demands of the board.

-- 
Chris Dent                  ┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)       https://anticdent.org/
freenode: cdent                                         tw: @anticdent