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Comment by jayofdoom | Hacker News Reader

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free.

It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

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OpenStack is one of the most complicated platforms in existence and finding suitably talented admins is very hard.

This is true, sadly -- but the documentation exists and community is friendly to those who wanna build those skills. It's extremely difficult to build something the size of OpenStack without making it so configurable that operating it needs a decoder ring. I'm doing everything I can in Ironic to make it more friendly and flexible out of the box, but it's a difficult problem to solve.

I always tell people: OpenStack can do almost anything you want... if you can configure it to do so :).

> More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter

Until they stop being open source. Like, you know, LocalStack.

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.

> 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.

There 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.

You 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.

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