On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Chip Childers <chip.child...@sungard.com> wrote: > David, > > My 2 cents (and possibly drawing flames myself): > > During the transition period (and beyond), Citrix is going to do what it > needs to do as a commercial entity. While this list is intended to focus > on the ASF project itself, it's going to take time for an official Apache > release to be approved. For the purpose of my point, the actual estimate > doesn't matter much really... shorter, longer or the same as the time it > took for AOO, it's going to be further off than (I assume) Citrix will wait > to create a commercial release of the Citrix Cloud Platform. > > I do think that there is value for the community to hear about the closed > efforts that Citrix completes (or plans to complete), and would disagree > with "banning" that type of information from being on this list. As an > individual that happens to work for Citrix, I don't see any conflict with > the two hats you wear (as most of us have multiple hats). > > However, I would suggest that it be limited to important milestones that > are being shared more publicly via other channels as well, and should > probably be clearly noted as being information from Citrix and not ASF. > > Examples: share information when you do a commercial release, but not when > a performance test is started by a Citrix QA engineer that's focused on an > upcoming commercial product release. > > I think that sharing public information about Citrix activities on this > list is a positive for the overall community. It's really no different > than sharing information about a commercial distributions success in a top > level Apache project's dev listing. It would be informational only, but be > a positive bit of news for the community as a whole. I assume that > everyone likes to hear about success stories. > > Since this is supposed to be a community owned list, I would hope that (if > there is consensus on the list) nobody has any issues about information > being shared that's of interest to the participants! > > -chip >
Hi Chip - your post reminded me that perhaps I assumed lots of knowledge. So Citrix announced that it will have a product based on CloudStack - and that will be known as Citrix CloudPlatform. I imagine that Citrix will end up with it's own release timings for that product, but don't personally have any insight into that. Citrix has indicated that it wishes to stay very close to upstream (CloudStack) - so I imagine that it will end up similar to the Fedora/RHEL model, where Fedora serves as the upstream for RHEL. I don't disagree that information sharing is a good thing, and have no doubt that some Citrix CloudPlatform information will appear on this list and I don't think that's a problem. My specific concerns revolve around the following items: * Confusion around the continued releases from Citrix - the move to the ASF has generated a lot of attention and with it expectations. * While this may be a pessimistic view - I fear that short of stringing this process out over some much longer period of time, that the 'overhead' of getting to that first Apache release doesn't go away - we just keep pushing it further down the calendar. So we are going to pay with the delay sooner or later and it's just a matter of when. This is especially true as the initial committers, and non-mentor PPMC members are currently all Citrix employees - most of whom have responsibilities around releases or the process that leads up to it. * Citrix-produced releases are inherently unfriendly to the community, I say this because Citrix-produced releases take a lot of the control out of the hands of the community. We already have multiple patches that have been in the queue for more than 2 weeks that haven't been applied because we are in a weird no-mans land between Citrix and Apache. We have a lot of interest in Apache CloudStack, lots of folks watching this list, wanting to get involved - the longer it takes for us to be able to engage with them, the worse off we will be from a contributor community perspective. While I am certainly sympathetic to the thoughts around keeping pace with code releases, making sure we get new features out as fast as possible, etc. I keep coming back to Apache's credo of 'Community over code', with a firm belief that even if it slows us down a bit initially, that embracing the Apache way is more important for our contributor community than more timely releases; besides with enough folks working, all work is shallow. --David
