On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 18:04 Nick Chase <nchase@...> wrote:

First off, please take this in the sprit in which it's intended. It's
not meant to be snarky or argumentative, (though it will probably sound
that way), it's just meant to start a conversation.

I've been thinking a lot about the conversation about working groups
from this morning's meeting, and I think we're missing a fundamental issue.

What I heard was a lot of talk about how "we don't want to be
kingmakers" and "people put more importance on being a CNCF project than
they should".  Well, if being a CNCF project doesn't mean anything ...
why do it?

In my opinion the foundations role should be a space for shared IP.

And I agreed that people are putting too much importance on being in the foundation. You can do open source without a foundation. The foundations role should not be marketing projects and creating non-organic growth but helping the projects have a space to work without worrying about IP or licensing. It should also help the communities of those projects get things they need like money for CI infrastructure or other things and making sure those projects communities are healthy.

thats what a foundation is in imho.

In fact, why have a foundation at all?

If the purpose of the CNCF is just to foster cloud native computing, and
not to validate a project's existence, then why handle projects at all? 
Why not just create standards, or even just recommendations, as W3C
did/does(?).

I guess what I'm saying is that while nobody likes politics -- and
believe me I DESPISE them -- if you're going to have a foundation that
is supposed to mean something, then ... it should mean something.

So my feeling is that we either bite the bullet and get tough about
letting projects in -- even if that means asking them to perhaps work
together, or create a joint API and then manage the API -- or we drop
the pretenses and just create a directory anybody can add themselves to.

See, I told you it would sound snarky, but really, I am only trying to
start the discussion.

Somebody please, tell me what I'm missing here.

----  Nick

--

Jessie Frazelle
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pgp.mit.edu