openstack team mailing list archive

["Boris Renski Jr. " <b@xxxxxxxxxx>]

While I like the simplicity and elegance of the newly proposed structure, I don’t see how it does away with the evils of the pay-to-play model…. Which is what you purport we are striving to achieve. What you, Josh, proposed is a simplified pay-to-play that arguably embraces the evils for the “market driven selfishness” in an even more obvious way than the model before it. In your case, all the seats are simply purchased for a fixed price of $200K. 

 

In my view the price tag for the sponsorship and the ultimate means for raising the money is not what drives OpenStack’s vendor independence principles. What matters the most is the degree of decoupling between the front-end, marketing  and the technical governance. Much of the OpenStack current momentum is due to this fairly unique way of doing open source where on one end you have an open, meritocracy-based technology community and, on the other – structured commercial interest that evangelizes it. As long as the two sides remain sufficiently decoupled (as they have been so far) – no OpenStack principles will be compromised. 

 

I think that the community needs to do away with this geek, open source mentality of “all corporations are evil” and harness the value in strong commercial forces evangelizing and battling for the interest of the independent technology community. This is what got OpenStack to where it is now. So far the line between technology and marketing been well maintained. The bottom line is that a) technical committee must be elected and driven by meritocracy; b) foundation board should have virtually no influence (which is the case in the current structure) on the technical committee. Everything else is noise. 

 

Once we accept this, the question of structuring the board really becomes the question of how does one raise the maximum amount of money to continue to have a centralized body with a mission to evangelize the project. You can structure it by tiers to let the bigger guys pay more and get a bigger logo on the homepage. You can do a flat structure like Josh proposed. You can auction off the board seats etc. 

 

The one thing I would do away with is the “elected board members” in favor of more associate member seats. This almost feels like a way to compensate the technology side for giving the marketing side leverage over the former. If we feel that this is necessary, it is a symptom of presence of technology-commercial coupling and we need to fix something else. All technical members should be elected based on merit. All board members – appointed based on monetary/evangelism contribution. Decoupling between technology direction and purchasing power should be rock solid. 

 

-Boris 

 

 

 

 

 

From: foundation-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:foundation-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joshua McKenty
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2012 11:20 AM
To: OpenStack; foundation@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OpenStack Foundation] Foundation Structure: An Alternative

 

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a diplomatic person. When we were launching OpenStack, this was a bit of an advantage (if we had waited for permission before releasing the Nova source code, we'd still be waiting) - but since the first summit, the community has grown so quickly, and become so diverse, that I have tried to leave discussions of governance, foundation structure, dispute resolution, and most particularly monetary corporate contributions, to others with more... tact.

 

But now I feel I have no choice but to speak up; I'm deeply concerned.  

 

The biggest, splashiest openstack stories of the past two years have all had the names of huge, multi-national corporations in them - names like IBM, AT&T, Dell, HP, and CISCO. And while their participation has been tremendously positive for the project (with Quantum and Crowbar standing as examples of this), I see things trending in a direction that makes me nervous for the smaller players - for the startups who will live or die on the strength of the OpenStack project. Like Piston Cloud.

 

The current official proposal for the foundation creates a new class of super-members - with a sticker price of $2.5M (due up front) that puts it out of reach of all but a small handful of organizations. 

 

This is not a new idea - it was the first structural proposal for the foundation that I heard from the organizing team, and I have argued against it (at times seemingly successfully) continuously since last fall.

 

I understand why it is appealing; it creates a small and manageable board of directors, with a large pool of resources, who shouldn't have too much trouble guiding and directing the outcomes of OpenStack. But it's not a structure that represents or embodies the principles that OpenStack was founded upon, and I think that while it may offer some short-term benefits, it may be damaging to the long-term health of the project because it strangles the ecosystem of contributing companies we've worked so hard to create. 

 

The "right" structure is a much harder thing to organize:

 - It recognizes and requires project contribution (code, tests, docs, bugs and evangelism) along with cash

 - It has a single class of corporate member, a level playing field

 - It has room for non-corporate members in the meaningful governance bodies (not tucked away in 'advisory' boards)

 - It aggressively and publicly resolves the conflict-of-interest between the 'company hat' and the 'project hat'

 

My understanding of the key challenges of this foundation board are the following:

 - Keep it small enough to be manageable (21 directors or less)

 - Supply enough funding to carry on with most of the current project support activities

 - Ensure representation of the diversity of the OpenStack community

 - Provide a mechanism for "industry luminaries" as well as OpenStack users and consumers to provide input and feedback

 

The target budget of the Foundation is around $3M per year. Without getting into a discussion about whether that's reasonable or not, I'd like to brainstorm how we could reach that goal in a way that better reflects our goals for an open and democratic community. How's this for a proposal:

 

 - One class of corporate member

 - Provide reasonable evidence of 2 FTE (full time equivalents) working on OpenStack in some capacity

 - Commit to 2 years of sponsorship, on an evergreen basis, but paid annually

 - Individual members, if there are any, cannot be employed by a corporate member

 

My rough calculation, having a reasonably good grasp of the interests and level of engagement of the various corporations in the OpenStack ecosystem, is that we could expect around 15 of the 150 companies involved to meet these requirements. $3M divided by 15 = $200,000. 

 

It's a high playing field, but at least it's a level one. It doesn't change the structure or composition of the technical committee, and it doesn't limit the ability of the foundation to raise money in other ways (sell sponsorships for events, charge admission for conferences, even license the use of the trademark for training or certification). 

 

If we have a simple pay-to-play model, then we can trust market economics and enforce transparency of spending. If we have a simple "meritocracy", then we can expect the most skilled and dedicated to rise to the top, provided we're extremely careful about how we measure skill and dedication. If we blend the two, I'm deeply concerned that we'll see the worst of both systems play out over time - the selfishness of market-driven economics dominating our decisions with the petulant moralism of the meritocracy. Hoping for any other outcome is, in my opinion, foolish optimism. 

 

At the core of OpenStack is the idea that a single project could address the needs of ALL of our organizations - large, small, producers, consumers, non-profits and tool makers. We need to guard that vision, and protect it from our best intentions. No one in the community, whether individual contributor or corporate sponsor, can claim to speak for (or even understand the perspective of) the majority of us. We're simply too numerous, and too diverse. If you believe, as I do, that *your* company should have a stake in OpenStack's future, then now is the time to speak up in favor of the level playing field we originally set out to create. 

 

With (attempted) diplomacy,

 

Joshua

 

--

Joshua McKenty

Co-Founder, OpenStack

CEO, Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

w: (650) 24-CLOUD

m: (650) 283-6846
http://www.pistoncloud.com

 

"Oh, Westley, we'll never survive!"
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