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There's a reason I point out the longevity of OpenStack. As a project, it has significant corporate sponsorship and policies to ensure that one entity can't tak
by jayofdoom 6mo ago
There's a reason I point out the longevity of OpenStack. As a project, it has significant corporate sponsorship and policies to ensure that one entity can't take over control of it. For instance; the OpenStack Technical Committee is never permitted to have a majority membership made up of a single entity's employees. This means that even though Red Hat, at this stage in it's development, has a majority of contribution, the project itself can never be taken over by a single entity.
People find project governance, and particularly "corporate" involvement in open source to be distasteful -- but in my experience, and OpenStack is a winning example of this -- setting up good boundaries to let companies work together has proven to be sustainable.
- lmz 6mo ago> This means that even though Red Hat, at this stage in it's development, has a majority of contribution, the project itself can never be taken over by a single entity. If it's one company with the majority of contributions then they can just stop contributing (or put their efforts into a proprietary fork) and all that you're left with is the code and the name. Which is maybe better than "just the code", but not by much.
- jayofdoom 6mo agoThere are over 600 different people contributing to OpenStack in a given six-month release cycle. Approximately 60% of total code by commit count is from Red Hat employees. I'm one of the 600 that don't work at Red Hat, and there are a lot of us. You should get a sense of the scale of a project before summarily declaring that it has a single point of failure.
- lmz 6mo agoYou just said majority without any numbers in the original post. I think you'll agree that the calculus would be quite different for 60% vs 85% of effort being from a single company.