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At the Open Infrastructure Summit, previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his speech to talk about the state of open source foundations – and what it's all about. often feels like increasing competition between them. "I know for a fact that no one has asked to replace duel sellers with duel foundations," he said. "Nobody asked for it."
He went on to point out, "What is the difference between a supplier who only promotes ideas that are in his own interest and a foundation that does the same thing? Or worse, a foundation that will only represent projects for which it is paid. "
What is quite unusual, Shuttleworth did not specify what foundations he was talking about, but since there are really only two foundations that are the subject of the law, it is quite clear that he was talking about OpenStack. Foundation and the Linux Foundation – and perhaps more specifically the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home to the popular Kubernetes project.
Ultimately, this is only part of his concern about the current state of open-source foundations. I sat down with Shuttleworth after his speech to discuss his comments, as well as announcements around the open infrastructure.
It should be noted at the beginning that the OpenStack Foundation uses this event to highlight the fact that it has now introduced new open infrastructure projects outside the OpenStack core software, two of which have come out of their pilot phase. Shuttleworth, who has relied heavily on OpenStack in the past and is attracting a lot of interest from customers, is not a fan. It should be noted that Canonical is also a major sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation. He thinks, however, that the foundation should focus on the central OpenStack project.
"We are deploying 27 OpenStack clouds, more than double the last year's processing rate," he said. "OpenStack is important. It is very complicated and difficult. And much of our effort has been to make things simpler and cleaner, despite the efforts of those around us in this community. But I believe it. I think if you need a large-scale and multi-tenant virtualization infrastructure, it's the best game in town. But there are problems. You have to focus. I am super attached to that. And I'm afraid people are concentrating, because something newer and more brilliant has appeared. "
To clarify this, I asked him if he really thought that the OpenStack Foundation was making a mistake in trying to be a complete infrastructure. "Yes, absolutely," he says. "At the end of the day, I think there are some projects for which this community is famous. They need concentration, they need attention, right? It's very difficult to say that they will get concentration and attention when you throw a ton of other things that no one has ever heard of, right? Why are you launching these things? Who is behind these decisions? Is it a question of money too? These are all just questions to ask. "
He does not believe, however, that all blame should lie with the Foundation's leadership. "I think these guys are really trying hard. I think the common characterization that he was unlucky is not helpful and is not accurate. We try to find solutions. Shuttleworth certainly does not believe the leadership is unfortunate, he pointed out, but he's obviously not happy with the current trajectory of the OpenStack Foundation.
The Foundation, of course, does not agree. As Mark Collier, Director of Operations at the OpenStack Foundation, told me, the organization is also committed to OpenStack. "The Foundation, the board, the community, the staff – we have never been so committed to OpenStack," he said. "If you look at the state of OpenStack, it's one of the three most active open source projects in the world right now. […] Our commitment to OpenStack does not falter. He also noted that the other projects that are now part of the foundation are a type of software useful to OpenStack users. "These are beneficial efforts for OpenStack," he said. In addition, he noted that the process of opening up the Foundation has been going on for over two years, with the vast majority of the community (about 97%) voting in favor.
Allison Randal, board member of OpenStack, echoed it. "In recent years and a long series of strategic conversations, we realized that OpenStack did not exist in a vacuum. The success of OpenStack depends on the success of a whole network of other open source projects, including Linux distributions and dependencies such as Python and hypervisors, but also the success of other open infrastructure projects that our users deploy. together. The OpenStack community has learned many things about the success of open collaboration over the years, and we hope that sharing these lessons and providing support can contribute to the success of other open infrastructure projects. The rising tide of open source lifts all boats. "
With regard to open source foundations in general, he certainly does not believe that it is a good thing that many foundations compete for projects. He says that we are still trying to understand the role of open source foundations and that we are in a somewhat awkward position now, as we are still trying to determine the best way to organize these foundations. "The open source in the company is really interesting. And the way we organize this in society is really interesting, "he said. "The way we lead this, how we organize it is really interesting and there will be steps forward and steps back. Foundations that tweet with anger are not very presidential. "
He also challenged the idea that if you integrate a project with a foundation, "everything will improve". It is too simplistic, according to him, because everything depends on the leadership of the foundation and the definition of its openness. "When you consider foundations as non-profit entities competing effectively for the control of the most important toys, I do not think it's at the service of the users."
When I asked him if he thought some foundations were doing a better job than others, he basically declined to comment. But he said that he thinks that the Linux Foundation does a good job with Linux, largely because it uses Linus Torvalds . "I think the technical direction of a complex project meeting the needs of many organizations is best served in this way, which the OpenStack Foundation could learn from the Linux Foundation. I would be happier if my dues allowed me to pay thoughtful leadership independent of the complexity of OpenStack rather than the kind of weird bun fights and stuffed ballots we see today. For all the kumbaya, it does not work completely. He believes projects must have independent leaders who can make long-term plans. "Linus's finger is an extremely useful and difficult tool when everyone is trying to get re-elected. It's easy to get indignant at Linus, but he's doing a damn good job, right?
OpenStack, he thinks, often lacks this type of decision because he tries to please everyone and attract more sponsors. "This may be the root cause," he said, and this leads to too much "puppet mastery behind the scenes."
In addition to our presentation on foundations, Shuttleworth also indicated that it felt the company was still on the road to an IPO. He obviously does not commit to a certain amount of time, but after a year of reconversion in 2018, he claims that Canonical's activities are optimistic. "We want to achieve $ 200 million in revenue and a decent growth rate, as well as the good stories around the data center, public cloud and IoT.
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