Open Stack

On 02/01/2016 02:31 PM, Russell Bryant wrote:
> 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.”

Hello, everyone!  The collaboration on this thread was great to see.
Let me try to summarize the proposals.

First, there was a debate about whether "progressively evolve" was
something that made sense.  Doug Hellmann proposed an alternative
without that point, along with some other wording improvements.

> To produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform
> that meets the needs of users and operators of public and private
> clouds of all sizes by being simple to implement, massively
> scalable, and interoperable.

Several people liked Doug's version, but still wanted to explore
accounting for the original intent of communicating our desire to
integrate with emerging technologies as they come along.  Mark Collier
proposed:

> To produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform
> that integrates with relevant technologies to meet the needs of users
> and operators of public and private clouds of all sizes by being
> simple to implement, massively scalable, and interoperable.

Similarly, Rocky proposed two variations:

> To produce and (advance|evolve) the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud
> Computing platform that meets the needs of users and operators of
> public and private clouds of all sizes by being simple to implement,
> massively scalable, and interoperable.

Ultimately, there seemed to be more support for excluding that point as
something that's more "how" and not "what".  Allison Randal summarized
this well with:

> To carry this forward a bit, the purpose of a mission statement is to
> outline 'What' an organization is trying to achieve, the 'How' part
> belongs in some other document. There has been some discussion recently
> on OpenStack Values, and a document outlining those would be the right
> place to include things like "approach development as a continuous
> process of evolution", "integrate with established technologies as they
> gain traction", and "avoid prejudice against ideas from other
> development communities or traditions".

To that end, Sean Dague proposed:

> To produce a ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform. It should
> be easy to use, simple to implement, work well at all scales, be
> interoperable between instances, and meet the needs of both public and
> private clouds.

and finally, Allison proposed a slight addition to Sean's version,
re-incorporating "users and operators.

> To produce a ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform. It should
> be easy to use, simple to implement, work well at all scales, be
> interoperable between instances, and meet the needs of users
> and operators of both public and private clouds.

This final version sounds fantastic to me.  What do you think?

-- 
Russell Bryant