Hi Ceph, TL;DR: I'm starting a new position at RedHat in the Ceph development team, mid-august. I will keep working under the newly elected head of the Ceph User Committee.
Cloudwatt is a company based in France which provides cloud services. My participation in Ceph (and erasure code specifically) was driven by their need for cheaper storage. I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity Cloudwatt gave me to exclusively work upstream. Now that Firefly is released and packaged, Cloudwatt will be able to deploy it in production and indeed save money. A lot more money than my salary, which is a sign of a sound relationship. There still is work to be done and I'll focus on pyramid codes for Giant. After that I'm not sure but I trust Samuel Just will find ways to keep me busy. When RedHat acquired Inktank my first reaction was : "Calamari will be Free Software, no more proprietary software !". The Atlanta OpenStack summit was the opportunity to discuss the consequences of the acquisition with dozens of people and I've not heard anyone say it was bad for the Ceph project. However I've heard about four problems worth considering: a) communication about the Ceph project is going to be driven by RedHat marketing b) there is no incentive for RedHat to establish a foundation, c) RedHat has much less incentive than Inktank to support multiple GNU/Linux distributions, d) Inktank customers are worried about the transition and need to be reassured. I also selfishly thought that RedHat/Inktank became a very appealing workplace. I'm committed to exclusively work on Free Software and RedHat is one of the few companies in the world where that is possible. I discussed it with Ian Colle & Sage Weil, sent a job application and was accepted. Since I've been working with the core team for some time now, it will not change much in terms of what I do. But one difference matters to me : I will get to hear about a variety of Ceph use cases that were previously kept secret because Inktank would not discuss about their customers with an external contributor. The downside of being hired by RedHat is that I'm no longer a community member and my judgment will be biased. I'm told RedHat employees are encouraged to have their own opinion and express them as I just did. But no matter how hard I try, I will gradually become less objective about the company paying my salary: it is the root of all conflicts of interest. To acknowledge that and keep working for the Ceph User Committee, I will not be a candidate to the next elections. I however pledge to assist the newly elected head of the Ceph User Committee, i.e. doing what I've done so far, only without the title nor the authority. Cheers -- Loïc Dachary, Artisan Logiciel Libre
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