openstack team mailing list archive

[Dean Troyer <dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 1:06 PM, Andrew Clay Shafer
<acs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> You say OpenStack has survived, but I believe we may have compounded and
> multiplied the challenges OpenStack faces by collectively neglecting to
> resolve this. Without going into all the technical necessity and political
> complexity, I would argue we allowed OpenStack fragmentation at the project
> level. Without a unified conscience of purpose, the fragmentation only gets
> magnified at the point users are interacting with different deployments.

This fragmentation with projects and goals is a real threat to the
long-term viability of OpenStack as a cloud standard.

> I don't believe that the kernel is a perfect analogy, but even if it was
> this one sentence 'OpenStack is like the Linux kernel' will not make it so.

Honestly, I HATE this analogy.  OpenStack has no BDFL, it has now a
foundation that is governed by Corporate interests that have a history
of working on common standards and tweaking them to add 'value'
('differentiation' I think is the buzzword for that).  The
organization of the foundation is partially designed to prevent any
one or two of these interests from pushing the whole in their
particular direction.  The foundation will have to prove itself
capable of pulling the projects forward. Together.

> What is the OpenStack equivalent of this?
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/3/8/495

The problem we have is that people in Linus' position are not created,
they grow and the position, respect and authority is earned.  The TC
may be able to earn some of that over time, but without unifying
leadership it will be tough going.  Hopefully their separation from
the rest of the board can give them a chance to provide the technical
leadership and direction needed even if it stubs a few toes along the
way.

It kills me that the acronym for OpenStack Foundation is OSF.  While I
don't think we can really be the Linux of the cloud any time soon, we
will have to really work to NOT be the UNIX of the cloud...

dt

-- 

Dean Troyer
dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx