Open Stack

OpenStack has a mission statement that has held up pretty well for the
life of the project so far.  That mission statement is:

> to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will
> meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being
> simple to implement and massively scalable.

Sometime late last year, a discussion emerged about updating the mission
statement to include some key themes that have become an important focus
of our community.

 * interoperability
 * end users

At the join board + TC meeting at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, the two
groups agreed that working on an update seemed reasonable and that we
wanted both groups to agree on those updates.

A few weeks ago, the TC came up with a proposed updated mission statement.

http://governance.openstack.org/resolutions/20160106-mission-amendment.html

That proposal is:

> to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that enables
> building interoperable public and private clouds regardless of size, by being
> simple to implement and massively scalable while serving the cloud users'
> needs.

The board discussed this proposal during the board meeting last week.
This spawned a good discussion.  There was a desire that we continue
that discussion on the foundation mailing list to incorporate additional
feedback.

One suggestion was that changing "that will meet the needs of public and
private clouds" to "that enables building ... public and private clouds"
was a downgrade.  The suggestion was to restore the original wording, as
it sounded like a more firm commitment.

The second major piece of feedback was that some people wanted to
somehow incorporate that OpenStack is not limited to a specific set of
technologies.  Specific talk of bare metal, VMs, and containers were
brought up as examples, but people wanted to somehow reflect that the
platform is evolving with major technology trends.

Rob Esker provided this suggested update which incorporates that feedback:

> "To produce and progressively evolve the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud
> Computing platform that meets the needs of public and private clouds
> regardless of size, by being simple to implement, massively scalable,
> interoperable, and easy to use.”

(Note: Rob's proposal didn't include the final comma.  I added it.  Feel
free to debate the merits of the oxford comma if you wish.)

If I missed anything or if anyone would like to provide additional
feedback, please respond on list.


I'm actually pretty happy with Rob's proposal.  I'd like to hear what
others think so we can continue moving forward.

Thanks!

-- 
Russell Bryant