Hi everyone, Back in 2014, OpenStack was facing a problem. Our project structure, inherited from days where Nova, Swift and friends were the only game in town, was not working anymore. The "integrated release" that we ended up producing was not really integrated, already too big to be installed by everyone, and yet too small to accommodate the growing interest in other forms of "open infrastructure". The incubation process (from stackforge to incubated, from incubated to integrated) created catch-22s that prevented projects from gathering enough interest to reach the upper layers. Something had to give.
The project structure reform[1] that resulted from those discussions switched to a simpler model: project teams would be approved based on how well they fit the OpenStack overall mission and community principles, rather than based on a degree of maturity. It was nicknamed "the big tent" based on a blogpost[2] that Monty wrote -- mostly explaining that things produced by the OpenStack community should be considered OpenStack projects. So the reform removed the concept of incubated vs. integrated, in favor of a single "official" category. Tags[3] were introduced to better describe the degree of maturity of the various official things. "Being part of the big tent" was synonymous to "being an official project" (but people kept saying the former). At around the same time, mostly for technical reasons around the difficulty of renaming git repositories, the "stackforge/" git repository prefix was discontinued (all projects hosted on OpenStack infrastructure would be created under an "openstack/" git repository prefix). All those events combined, though, sent a mixed message, which we are still struggling with today. "Big tent" has a flea market connotation of "everyone can come in". Combined with the fact that all git repositories are under the same prefix, it created a lot of confusion. Some people even think the big tent is the openstack/ namespace, not the list of official projects. We tried to stop using the "big tent" meme, but (I blame Monty), the name is still sticking. I think it's time to more aggressively get rid of it. We tried using "unofficial" and "official" terminology, but that did not stick either. I'd like to propose that we introduce a new concept: "OpenStack-Hosted projects". There would be "OpenStack projects" on one side, and "Projects hosted on OpenStack infrastructure" on the other side (all still under the openstack/ git repo prefix). We'll stop saying "official OpenStack project" and "unofficial OpenStack project". The only "OpenStack projects" will be the official ones. We'll chase down the last mentions of "big tent" in documentation and remove it from our vocabulary. I think this new wording (replacing what was previously Stackforge, replacing what was previously called "unofficial OpenStack projects") will bring some clarity as to what is OpenStack and what is beyond it. Thoughts ? [1] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/resolutions/20141202-project-structure-reform-spec.html [2] http://inaugust.com/posts/big-tent.html [3] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/tags/index.html -- Thierry Carrez (ttx) __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
