Open Stack

On 07/08/2013 08:24 PM, Joshua McKenty wrote:
> I believe that the OpenStack marketing community sees comparisons to
> other open source cloud frameworks as significant competitive
> positioning. Accuracy in that data would be valuable to the whole community.

If you're arguing that Activity Board should include some data from
other cloud frameworks let's discuss what questions you'd like to see
answered/what raw data. Keep in mind that comparing different projects
is like comparing oranges and apples: cloudstack and openstack are not
comparable. The work that Qingye Jiang does is IMHO valuable when it
highlights trends across different metrics for separate projects but it
opens to all sorts of criticisms when it creates indexes like the
Activeness Index and when it compares absolute numbers across projects
(for example, the way openstack uses its -dev mailing list  is different
than cloudstack's making the comparison irrelevant; neither you can
compare discussions on gerrit with mlist traffic).

I wouldn't want the Foundation to produce anything like a comparative
analysis for public consumption. IMHO public comparative reports would
create way too much noise and risk of distracting our marketing
resources.

For internal reports I'd be open to start tracking some significant
metrics from other projects: let me know which ones you care about and
I'll be happy to work on producing a periodic report for staff and board.

> I *know* that a number of OpenStack member companies use their
> "position" in terms of ATC contributions as a marketing point, and
> having an accurate baseline for those numbers might also be valuable.

All that data is public on the OpenStack Activity Board: data may be
wrong though and if you spot mistakes please let me know so I can
correct them. How companies decide to use public data gathered from
gerrit, git/github etc is their decision to make.

> For example, DreamHost has suddenly become the most substantial
> contributor to Quantum *ever*. :)

I see the smile ... but for the record, your link refers to a report
limited to havana only and counts 'Lines of code' (added/removed? not
clear) which is a very poor metric when quoted out of context: I'm sure
you know and I'd expect to count on people that know for not quoting
such data point out of context.

> As for myself, I often use the count of individual members, corporate
> members, and total committers in sales and marketing materials - and
> I've found a number of discrepancies in the user database that I find
> concerning (duplicate names, etc.). 

BI is hard :) At the moment the database of people+affiliation as
cleaned up by Bitergia is what I consider the most reliable produced by
the Foundation. It's built by merging the Foundation db and the lists
included in the git-dm tables and some extra manual cleanup.  I can have
that one published if you think it's needed. You can also look at the
JSON files and the database dumps linked from
http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/index.html which are the
results of elaboration. We can discuss on -dev under the [metrics] topic
more about the technical details.

> Solid, official data is valuable for
> everyone - and I think inviting these other projects to join the
> activity board effort, by making it an openstack project itself, could
> be a great way to get there. 

Definitely, I have already invited Mirantis to join the current efforts.
I'm waiting to see their code in order to judge if and how it can be
merged with the Activity Board. I definitely like their UI, although it
has less dimensions than I need to see.

I always loved the idea of having *one* place for all OpenStack-related
data and I've learned that no matter what I wish, there will always be
somebody with his/her own itch to scratch who decides to create a new
source of data and reports.

/stef