Month: November 2016

There has been a bit of concern expressed lately that OpenStack is somehow losing its focus, and is in danger of losing its momentum because of the effect of the Big Tent, and its  resulting growth in the number of projects that call themselves OpenStack. This growth has even been blamed for the recent layoffs of OpenStack developers. Some have called on the OpenStack leadership to dismantle the Big Tent approach, and only focus on a few core projects.

While it is true that the plethora of projects has diverted attention from the work needed in the heart of OpenStack (and I won’t go into how to draw the line separating the two here), I feel that the criticism is misplaced. It isn’t up to the governing bodies of OpenStack to enforce such a refocusing; rather, it is up to the contributors to make such decisions. That’s just the way that open source development works. It is silly to think that companies like HPE would take their marching orders from the OpenStack Foundation Board, or the OpenStack TC. The idea of the Big Tent, that all projects that are “one of us” shall have access to the same resources, is fine as it is.

The mistake that I believe many companies made is that they tried to focus on beefing up numbers that are irrelevant, such as lines of code, or the number of cores or PTLs they employed, as a way of demonstrating their commitment to OpenStack. They then would use those numbers for their sales teams as a selling point for their OpenStack-based offerings.

Open Source is a difficult sell for most companies; they certainly understand the benefit when they use it, but have a much harder time justifying the cost of paying their employees to work on something that is used by everyone, even their competitors. So they came up with ways of selling their particular spin on OpenStack, and used these contribution number to impress customers. So when that failed to generate the type of revenue that was expected, out came the axe.

I believe that many of these companies encouraged the development of these small peripheral projects because it would be easier for one of their employees to achieve core status, and possibly get elected PTL, which their marketing departments would use in an attempt to prove that company’s OpenStack-ness.

I don’t agree that there is anything that OpenStack itself needs to do. Rather, the companies who are contributing to OpenStack need to better understand the nature of open source development, and focus on those areas that will make OpenStack as a whole richer and more reliable, instead of gaming the system to make themselves look important. So please stop saying that this is the fault of the Big Tent.