Open Stack

Let me make a suggestion.  There are many participants here who represent a variety of interests, some are in large companies, some in small, some academics, some purist technologists, etc.  Rackspace perceived and articulated the need to create a legal entity because of feedback from the community that OpenStack will do better if it is disconnected from one vendor. They listened and are in middle of the lengthy and complex process of doing this. We should appreciate their investment in this activity.

The community can help. Let's focus on forward progress.  We all have concerns that we hope the foundation will address.  Let's articulate them explicitly as risks (in a list, on a wiki).  Small vendors might be concerned that large vendors could buy their way into influence.  Large users might be concerned that a block of vendors fork the project and lock them into a path toward closed source. Etc.  There are all sorts of risks that people perceive.  Some might be more reasonable than others.  But if we put it out there in a risk-list then we can, as a community:

1. weigh each risk by voting on its perceived likelihood multiplied by its severity.
2. connect each risk with some element of the foundation proposal to determine if the risk is being addressed.
3. identify those risks that the foundation does not address -- as risks we simply have to take in this community.

A risk is not a problem, it is the possibility that a problem could occur.  So there is nothing accusative about listing a risk. So make the list long and inclusive. Once we have a list we can do something about it.  In this way, the conversation does not backtrack.  With a running risk-list we can then apply risk-abatement proposals to each risk and we can see which risks are considered likely, which severe in their potential impact, which are addressed by some abatement strategy, and which remain as risks that we accept.

Again, it's a suggestion, you are welcome to take it and use it as you see fit. After all, this is not the first time people here have created such foundations, so we can certainly leverage processes that have worked in the past.


gil yehuda
director of open source and open standards at Yahoo! Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-bounces at lists.openstack.org [mailto:foundation-bounces at lists.openstack.org] On Behalf Of Jim Jagielski
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2012 7:33 AM
To: Thierry Carrez
Cc: foundation at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [OpenStack Foundation] [Openstack] Foundation Structure: An Alternative

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 10:13 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> Jim Jagielski wrote:
>>
>> Then what does the foundation board get out of it...?
>
> Ask them :)

Well hopefully *somebody* has!
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