Since roughly October, some of the OVS committers have been talking over the idea of bringing Open vSwitch into a foundation. Originally the group discussing the idea was Justin, Russell, Thomas, and me, but we later expanded it to include all of the OVS committers.
The kinds of changes we're interested in include transferring
ownership of the openvswitch.org and ovn.org domain names, hosting and
administration of the website, mailing lists, and forwarding email
addresses for ovn.org, formalizing the existing processes for adding
and removing committers, and obtaining support for organizing the
annual Open vSwitch conference. Possibly, OVS could benefit from
joining a foundation in other ways, such as trademark registration,
founding a centralized test or performance lab, etc., but those
potential benefits have not been our focus.
We think that Open vSwitch development works quite well as a rule and
we have no desire to disrupt that, so we also have a list of changes
that we do *not* want to make. These include introducing new
processes for committers such as requiring copyright assignments or
CLAs (contributor license agreements), significant changes to other
policies and processes we have that are working, and significant
technical changes to our repositories on the basis of e.g. legal
requirements from a foundation.
One option is to form our own foundation. To do this right, it would
be a lot of work. We did not seriously pursue this possibility.
We seriously considered three options:
- Apache Software Foundation. We had a call with members of the
Apache board. Apache would offer OVS all of the services that
we want. (They contract with the Linux Foundation to handle
events such as conferences.) However, they are very "cookie
cutter" in that every Apache project is expected to fit into its
strictly defined model. This would be difficult for OVS. For
example, the only acceptable license is the Apache license,
which means that the Linux kernel portions of the OVS project
would have to be broken out into a separate repository and could
not be officially part of the project. (We asked specifically
about this.) As a second example, Apache requires use of their
CLA and all of the committers would be required to sign it and
to get their employers to sign it. We considered these issues
to be too disruptive to the project.
- Software in the Public Interest (spi-inc.org), aka SPI, the
parent of the Debian project. In many ways it is almost the
diametric opposite of the Apache Software Foundation. Projects
have a lot of freedom to operate as they choose, which is a
positive, but on the other hand SPI does not provide much in the
way of services. SPI could accept assets such as domain names,
and hold donations, but it's questionable whether SPI could
relieve us from burdens in hosting and administering even
mailing lists, and we could not expect help in running events.
- Linux Foundation (LF). We held calls and meetings with LF
executive director Jim Zemlin and vice president Mike Dolan. LF
has all the services we're interested in. For established
projects, like OVS, they aim to avoid disrupting processes and
policies that work, so we could retain, unchanged, most of the
existing OVS governance.
We came to consensus among our small group and then among the
committers in joining the Linux Foundation. Since then, we've
iterated through a few versions of a proposed charter for the Open
vSwitch project within Linux Foundation. I'm attaching a PDF of the
most recent version. The committers have come to informal consensus
in favor of this charter. VMware, which owns or employs owners of
some OVS-related assets, is also on board.
Here's my summary of the document. Very little is changing. Under
the LF, OVS would have a technical steering committee (TSC), whose
membership is the current OVS committers. OVS retains its existing
documented procedures. The most important of these is the procedure
for adding new committers, in which existing committers nominate new
ones based on their contributions to the project. The details are
here:
https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs/blob/master/Documentation/committer-grant-revocation.md
The OVS committers span a number of organizations and specialties and
represent the top contributors to the project. A current list is
included in the main repo:
https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS.md
Inclusion in the group of committers is tied to an individual's
contributions, not their affiliation.
LF expects OVS to be a rather small budgetary burden, due to the
project's simple structure. The TSC will coordinate with LF for any
budgetary needs.
At this point, I'd like to suggest that people read over the draft
and, if you have comments, bring them up here for discussion. After
allowing time for discussion, the committers will hold a vote on
joining the Linux Foundation. I believe that that is the final step
in the plan.
Ben Pfaff (on behalf of all the OVS committers)
P.S. Please ignore the dates in the charter. We will update them.
Open_vSwitch_Charter_2016-04-22.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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