Sam, Thanks for this context, I found it very helpful. We have an interesting situation where no large companies are involved, and really this is all about the needs of open source users. As you know Apache CloudStack is highly user driven, and is perhaps thankfully off the radar of the large industry players who have a tendency to subvert community interests in the interest of short term gain (and good governance comes in handy at such times, so we all understand the value of CloudStack being part of the ASF in that sense). Apache CloudStack also has some sophisticated reads related to CI/CD that are perhaps not common, and therefore require special consideration.
I don’t know the Apache Foundation well enough to understand whether the large government style bureaucracy including poor communication is a normal thing, or whether the fact that there aren’t big players with sophisticated lobbying capabilities involved is the reason the community’s needs aren’t being addressed (not that I would even know if the ASF is susceptible to that). Trying to understand the cause behind the symptoms aside, the health and success of the Apache CloudStack project should be in the interests of both the ASF and CloudStack users and contributors. The community values the governance of the ASF and the ASF should value an engaged and motivated community, so why we are mired in such innuendo is beyond me (conspiracy theories!). Unless some of us are actually not here to build great open source software in the interest of users. So this appears to be the kind of time when leadership combined with clarity of thought and communication are important to avoid conversation devolving into simply “people being wrong on the internet”. I think I understand that the PMC leads the community. Who represents the ASF leadership on this topic? I think they should be engaged on this issue. Ian On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 10:18 AM, Sam Ruby <ru...@intertwingly.net> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Daan Hoogland <daan.hoogl...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 8:24 PM, Jim Jagielski <j...@jagunet.com> wrote: >> >>> That sounds like a cop-out to me related to what's really going >>> on. >> >> Jim, I am not a native english speaker and this remark has no meaning to >> me. It sounds somewhat hostile, can you explain what you mean? > > I think there was a misunderstanding and history involved, and I'm > working to clean that up. > > The history involved is not unique to CloudStack. It often comes up > when large projects or large companies are involved. I work for a > large company (IBM), and often when IBM contemplates donating a > project to the ASF, the people involved are referred to me. The most > extreme example I recall was when a high level executive told me he > wanted to take a project to Apache, but wanted a different license, to > be able to control who got commit access, and to run the project on > different hardware. My response was simply: "then you don't want to > come to the ASF". > > Here we had the CloudStack PMC make a reasonable request to ASF > infrastructure team (i.e., for more granular permissions), and were > not only told no, but that their request was placed on the back > burner. I'm not proud of that response. A technical solution to the > problem was developed (kudos!) and a proof of concept was deployed > (cool!). Unfortunately, the proof of concept was poorly communicated, > and many (not just Jim!) saw this as an unfriendly act. And to be > very clear, the optics were very bad: within 5 days of opening a JIRA > that was rejected, the CloudStack team looked like they were > unilaterally moving off of the ASF provided GitHub repository. > > I don't think that there are any easy answers. In particular, I don't > think that projects should ever have to simply take no for an answer. > And the fact that the board didn't provide a response to the top issue > listed in the December board report, and didn't reply to the attempt > to provide an out-of-cycle report last month didn't help. > > Despite this clear failure of the board, I would suggest that the > CloudStack team alert the board before taking such an action again. > > - Sam Ruby -- Ian Rae CEO | PDG c: 514.944.4008 CloudOps | Cloud Infrastructure and Networking Solutions www.cloudops.com | 420 rue Guy | Montreal | Canada | H3J 1S6
