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  2. What's the point? (or,"What's the Emperor wearing?")

Re: What's the point? (or,"What's the Emperor wearing?")

Bryan Cantrill <bryan@...>
 


I agree with Jessie -- and for whatever it's worth, here were my reasons to be involved with the CNCF during its inception over three years ago:


I expanded on that ~five months later:


Three years later, that's still the appeal for me: serving our industry by serving the open source projects that represent the foundation for cloud-native infrastructure.  I think we have had some successes in that regard -- but not without our share of stumbles.  The conversation this morning was a promising start to a conversation that sorely needs to be had -- and is likely without easy answers.

       - Bryan




On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 3:30 PM, Jessica Frazelle via Lists.Cncf.Io <me=jessfraz.com@...> wrote:


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
4096R / D4C4 DD60 0D66 F65A 8EFC  511E 18F3 685C 0022 BFF3
pgp.mit.edu
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