Aeolus Community Assessment

Hugh O. Brock hbrock at redhat.com
Thu Jun 7 15:34:28 UTC 2012


On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 08:44:05AM +0200, Jan Provaznik wrote:
> On 06/04/2012 09:39 PM, Chris Alfonso wrote:
> >Problem Statement:
> >Aeolus projects upstream community is Red Hat, full stop.
> >

[snip]

> >
> >Suggested Actions:
> >1 - take one some of the suggested architectural changes that make the
> >aeolus components more reusable in projects outside aeolus as a whole
> >2 - set up a schedule to start marketing the components and aeolus as a
> >whole, go out and get community members instead of waiting for them to
> >show up
> >
> >If you think this is bonkers or if you have any other opinions on how we
> >can better foster the community, let's hear it.
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >Chris
> >
> >[1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1656616
> >[2]
> >http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/howtobuildcommunity.xml#body.1_div.3
> >[3] www.feedbooks.com/book/4285.pdf (The Cathedral and the Bazaar)
> >[4]
> >http://michaeldehaan.net/post/21881841161/my-working-theory-of-open-source-project-leadership
> >
> >[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_Dreams
> 
> Hm, it seems my mail wasn't delivered to aeolus-devel yesterday,
> resending it...
> 
> 
> Hi Chris,
> It would be best to get the answer on "What are biggest blockers for
> community" from community, but since Aeolus community is... not big,
> it's up to us to do initial step - thanks for opening this topic.
> 
> What I don't agree with is doing some architecture changes because
> of hoping we attract some ppl. First, I'm not convinced that the
> Aeolus would become simpler and second I don't believe this is a
> blocker. I would say that most people don't even get to this level
> (where they look at Aeolus architecture). True is that some
> architecture changes mentioned in your list are already happening as
> mentioned in other replies.
> 
> As you said, we should let people know that Aeolus exists which we
> probably don't do loud enough. Also we should offer them easy way
> how to try it. But installing Aeolus on non-rpm systems (and non-rpm
> systems are majority) is pretty difficult. I don't think many people
> pass through this level. So one of first steps would be creation of
> general .tar.gz package(s) which can be installed on any distro
> (+some installation script like aeolus-configure).
> 

Thanks to everyone who has weighed in thus far.

I think it's fair to say two or three things based on what I've read:

* Everyone agrees we aren't doing enough to talk up the project and
  evangelize it and we need a whole lot more planning around
  that.

* Everyone agrees that we do a lousy job of making the project
  consumable to non-RH developers -- we should have tarballs
  available, if possible we should have things broken out into
  rubygems, our configure stuff should be platform-agnostic, etc. 

* Everyone is deeply skeptical of top-down rearchitecture for its own
  sake, and, I dare say, deeply skeptical of architecture in general.

To all of this I say, excellent, absolutely correct. We can move
forward *right now* on making what we have much friendlier and more
consumable, and we can move forward in the very near term about making
evangelism and "talking up the project" happen. I'd like to challenge
those of you who have responded thus far to propose the following:

1. A concrete plan for making the bits consumable for developers on a
wider set of platforms. You define the set, but OSX should probably be
part of it since we're in the Ruby world.

2. A concrete plan, or at least some good ideas that we can turn into
a plan, for getting more developer attention. Propose anything you
want.

Now, I've also read a surprisingly spirited defense of the
Conductor-and-friends architecture as it currently stands. I want to
make absolutely clear that I do not care what the architecture is, and
that even if I did I wouldn't tell you :). However I'd like to suggest
a couple things I think the community should be thinking about in
having these discussions.

1. Successful open source projects do one thing well;

2. Successful open source communities aren't tied to the success or
failure of a single project within that community.

(Thanks to Steve Dake for doing a great job of articulating these
points). 

I think it's pretty clear that Aeolus as it is currently constituted
does not meet either of these criteria. I would challenge folks on
this list to imagine what the Aeolus ecosystem would have to look like
if it did meet them.

--Hugh


-- 
== Hugh Brock, hbrock at redhat.com                                   ==
== Engineering Manager, Cloud BU                                   ==
== Aeolus Project: Manage virtual infrastructure across clouds.    ==
== http://aeolusproject.org                                        ==

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
--Robert McCloskey



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