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Does OpenStack Need a Linus Torvalds?
BButlerNWW writes in with a story that speculates about the need for a marquee name to head OpenStack. "OpenStack has been dubbed by some enthusiasts as the Linux of the cloud — an open source operating system for public or private clouds. But there's one stark difference between the two projects: OpenStack doesn't have a Linus Torvalds, the eccentric, outspoken, never-afraid-to-say-what-he-thinks leader of the Linux world. Torvalds personifies Linux in many ways. OpenStack doesn't have that one central figure right now. The question is: Does OpenStack need it? Some would argue yes. Torvalds, because of the weight he holds in the project, calls the shots about how Linux is run, what goes in, what stays out of the code, and he's not afraid to express his opinions. He provides not only internal guidance for the project, but also an exterior cheerleading role. Others would say OpenStack does not need a Torvalds of its own. The project is meant to be an open source meritocracy, where members are judged based on their code contributions to the project. OpenStack has been fighting an image that the project is just full of corporate interests, which is part of the reason Rackspace ceded official control of the project to the OpenStack Foundation recently."
It could be argued that one of the main reasons why Linux has utterly failed as an operating system for average people on average computers is Linus Torvalds. It has certainly been successful in other areas, but as a "just works" freeware replacement for Windows, it's been a bust.
Maybe it would be best if Open Stack stays relatively free of one person's influence, or one clique's interest, for that matter.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Everything is better with Linus!
Comparing technical leadership to business leadership wow.
Linus essentially has one rule. Don't break it if it works. Even when Linus uses his bully pulpit to blast another project it is because they have broken things that worked.
Linus does not set a vision or a direction beyond code quality.
The comparison being made is like comparing an apples and a rubix cubes.
To my shame I can't name the equivalent on Linus for Apache, and that's done pretty well. I don't think you need to have a figurehead for this, I just think that at the end of the day OpenStack is a bit..... well.... dull. That's not necessarily bad, but isn't a bit like saying "We need a figurehead to control the drafting of acceptable banana radii of curvature as then everyone will be interested in the project".
The summary makes a strong point: Linux is heavily dependent on Linus. Should we worry about this? What happens when Linus calls it quits, one way or another?
Mod me off-topic, if you must, but it's a question we'll need to face, at some point.
I started off writing this with; "While I have great respect and admiration for Linus I seriously doubt that having one unilateral "decision maker" is an advantage..."
After some thought it turned into; "Sure there is always a slow-down due to additional debate when there is more than one person at the helm however, when they reach a consensus and fail they will not be able to pinpoint the guilty party.
I guess what I'm saying is that if you have a wagon and that's pulled by 10 horses that's great, as long as they all pull in the same direction.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
the vast majority of humans relate to other humans far more than to software, especially very very detailed software. Of course the project does not 'need' a person, other humans need a person to identify the project and give it some human traits somehow, as you describe in the article.. Is this important enough to 'get' a human to do that? hmmm
Well, I would have modded you up
Linus specifically set up Linux development to not be dependent on him by creating git. People don't technically have to build from his own tree, but people do because they trust their experience with working with him.
You cannot just install a Torvalds into OpenStack. If there is no Torvalds of OpenStack, it's because no one is technically qualified or has the reputation for it.
This kind of reasoning is purely cargo cult management. You would think people have learnt to stop thinking in cargo cult ways by now.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
"OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich."
It seems to be mostly a Python-based automated system administration tool set for managing big machine farms. But the documentation is so buzzword-compliant it's hard to tell what actually works. The goal seems to be to have something like an open-source version of Amazon Web Services. Allocate real or virtual machine instances, load them up with executable images, hook them to some stored data sets, tell the network where the instances are and what they can talk to, and go. That's reasonable enough, and it would help if they'd just say that. And be clear about what actually works.
n/t
(captcha: industry)
Do they need a self-opinionated little twat who writes three lines of code, bundles it with 300,000 lines of someone else's code and then names the whole lot after himself? No.
As formulated it's flamebait but seriously, you can't just pick a guy and nominate him to be the "Linus Torvalds" of your project and pretend it'll be the same. If Linus were to step down today, it doesn't matter who of the lieutenants who'd step up - they'd never have the same kind of authority to be the voice of Linux. It's the difference between being the founder like Jobs or Gates and your run-of-the-mill CEO. Even if your on top of the organization chart, you're not the benevolent dictator for life.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've looked over OpenStack and it looks great, with one exception: block storage (ie volumes.)
GlusterFS currently isn't recommended for VM storage by the GlusterFS people. They say "maybe" with the next release.
Sheepdog isn't recommended for production (and from what I read, provides abysmal performance - we're talking single-digit MB/sec.)
Lustre requires enormous setup+admin overhead.
DRBD isn't scalable beyond 2 nodes, really, and has serious issues with reliability and keeping in sync.
They've made a huge hullabaloo about Cinder - it's going to do my taxes, slice bread, and surpass Christ - but information as to what the hell it actually is or how it'll do it, beyond marketing-speak, is difficult to find. If you dig around, you find that it's a layer on top of other network block devices.
Far as I can tell, the only free (in either sense) backend they support is Sheepdog, which, as I said before, isn't considered anywhere near production ready.
It also appears that 'Highly available', 'fault-Tolerant', and so on- is coming from the underlying storage, not Cinder itself.
So, where's the beef? You can't have an "open" visualization system if you then require a netapp, IBM, or nexenta backend (sidenote: has anyone SEEN nexenta pricing? Holy christ on a stick!)
Please help metamoderate.
Awww, did someone's widdle kernel patch get rejected...?
A power that has wrecked the ISO should be able to make short work of OpenStack.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My guess is that as with so many other open source projects most developers prefer to start new things over fixing and streamlining existing ones. That is why a lot of those projects never really get rid of minor bugs until that very part of the project gets declared obsolete and replaced by something else introducing new bugs.
If that's the case with the OpenStack project as well, it certainly does require someone like Linus, who freezes the new submissions until the current stuff got fixed.
IMO it doesn't even require a single person at the top calling the shots, as long as the developers can overcome and succumb their egos and personal interests to a basic ruleset that'll make sure, everyone is pulling the same direction
No.
He (Linus) provides not only internal guidance for the project, but also an exterior cheerleading role
After all Linus is just a really ugly cheerleader :)
I hate this word because meritocracies are horrible and no one seems to understand that. One shouldn't base judgements upon members by their past merits but by what they're doing now, a "do-ocracy". Meritocracies leave OSS projects broken as people who haven't contributed anything in years hold access to all the key infrastructure, get to make decisions even though they contribute nothing, etc.
but i totes gotta take a fat shiite
I love how when you go to the 'what is openstack' tab all you get is who and some why, but not WTF openstack is. Nobody cares who, and why only matters in the tangible terms of 'will save you money' or 'will make your life easier'.
On the 'What' tab you are still wondering 'what' it is and therein lies the problem. Its a bunch of python (!?!) tools for managing VM-centric environments. That is not an OS, and its hardly a useful API. Python is enterprise useful, its not enterprise class but that is another subject altogether.
The real question is who does it benefit. If they set out to prove that they have a tangible alternative to VMWare they probably should not have let them in to begin with but they figured that out anyways. System admins.. ok but if you are a torvalds class of developer is that going to excite you? The community should really be looking towards the work that Sun started, their virtualization, networking, and storage was second to none (still is) and that should be the model of how openstack works, not VMWare. That is what would excite someone like a Torvalds, not openstack as it is today.
I have no idea. With something like Proxmox I download it, install it and start running KVM and OpenVZ machines. Easy. With OpenStack, I go to their web site and I find nothing but a bunch of marketing crap. Cynical me just looks around there and thinks that some companies have got together to make something look open and look as if there might be some open source code and downloads 'somewhere', but there aren't. This is all to try and protect their expensive 'real' products that they know are probably under threat from a truly open source competitor but they just want to muddy the waters.
I think Joel Spolsky or someone once called it 'fire and motion'.
Linus made a project to make a UNIX like operating system. He found like minded individuals that wanted to help on USENET. I still look fondly back at the old days of trying to get the build to work. Later own I was able to have CDs mailed to me from people like CheapBytes that made the work so much easier (I don't missed the days of dialup internet). Eventually RedHat came around and I was hooked. Through it all Linus kept the project on course.
It takes a lot of discipline to take an idea from a post on USENET in 1991 to what Linux is today. His discipline and stewardship is worth way more than any code that he contributed to the cause.
Okay I used up my "stick up for Linus" allowance for the year.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Did you ever try running OpenStack on Xen? It's nigh on impossible. This is one of the many reasons why I am looking at CloudStack now.
So I am assuming they mean since Chris Kemp left to start Nebula? (which is based on OpenStack)? I mean he was the CTO @ NASA and a pretty well spoken guy - I guess I am just not getting this?
Is that you RMS?
You only had 10 years to put together a working kernel before Linus sat down and just did it.
Take that and stick it in your beard.
There are plenty of other Open Source/Free Software projects out there, with varying degrees of traction, that don't have a highly visible leader. For example FreeBSD, NetBSD, Apache, and JBoss. Each of those projects have very high adoption within the world of computing but I can't think of one name that pops to mind when mentioning those, with the possible exception of Jordan Hubbard for FreeBSD in the past. I agree that a benevolent dictator of a project can give it direction and a strategic vision, but is not necessary to make a project successful.
I use Linux, not GNU/Linux.
And the reason that its utterly failed is Gnome.
Honestly, why do people task these stupid questions? Any article that asks a question is mostly bullshit, full of nonsense and speculation. It feels as if they are just try to throw up any shit they can think of to gain page hits and stir the pot when nothing needs to be stirred.
Linux has Linus Torvolds because Torvolds wrote the damn thing. Its like asking if "Project/Business X" needs a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs. They started their respective businesses/projects from the very beginning and thus have a vested interest and say in the direction the project or company is headed.
How would they even go about finding and selecting people to be their Torvolds?
That's great and all, but honestly; who gives 2 craps about OpenStack? Linus as you said started and guided the construction of a serious system, OpenStack has started and guided the gathering of other people's serious systems. OpenStack is an irrelevant waste.
If you feel that way about OpenStack then why even post at all?
that an OS for cloud infrastructure would not need - and could perhaps be incompatible with - a central leader.
Actually Linux did not start out as a "serious system" it started out as a hobby. I took the liberty of googling for an old post of Linus to show the understatement of the last millennium:
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
How about Larry "Sugarbear" Reyes? You don't need a technical head, just some guy from Rackspace to run around in a straight jacket.
The whole world needs a Linus Torvalds!
Why are Nobel Prizes PS? Cause Obama got one and Linus did not!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
The recent conference/summit (was a bit of lower energy affair) in San Diego seems to have started a phase of architectural changes to make it a better product. 3 releases at least before it reaches some respectable state.
It takes a lot of discipline to take an idea from a post on USENET in 1991 to what Linux is today. His discipline and stewardship is worth way more than any code that he contributed to the cause.
Later perhaps, but not the first few years. According to online sources Linus had the copyright on about 2% of the early 2.6.x kernel and it was 5.2 MLOC, meaning 104 kLOC is written by Linux himself and those are mostly the "core" parts not arch/driver-specific code. The GNU/Hurd project had plenty stewards, but they had no doers quite like Linus.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've been running vanilla Debian stable for about a year and a half after finally giving up on Ubuntu. Before Ubuntu, I was running Gentoo. Before that, Mandrake before it became Mandriva. Before that, Red Hat. Suffice it to say, I've got some experience with a few varieties of Linux that date back about 15 years.
I haven't had to drop to the command line for anything for a long, LONG time. Not a single admin task, application, or quick function. Not once. Virtually every capability has been available as a solid, dependable GUI app for close to 5 years. The last couple of laggards were probably audio and video driver management. Even those had decent GUI alternatives about 3 years ago. Heck, Debian's graphical installer worked just fine for a newbie that I introduced to it.
Like you do on Windows, I still go to the command line for some stuff. It can be faster to do so in some circumstances, for one. For another, I happen to like some of the console based apps a lot more than their GUI counterparts, but that's at least partly due to my familiarity with the CLI version than it is the GUI interface itself. Also, automating stuff is a heck of a lot easier and more flexible with a shell or Python script than it is through a GUI.
The point is, if you still think you need to drop to the command line to do anything on a Linux box, you are seriously out of touch with the current state of affairs. (Of course, if you've only tried Ubuntu I don't blame you for being confused. It's a lousy distro for a lot of reasons.)
You know what, in the interests of catching up with things (because you're absolutely right - I am out of touch and most of my experience comes from Ubuntu), I'm downloading Debian 6.0.6 right now. I'll throw it in a VM* and see how it plays out.
Amusingly your linux history isn't too different from my own, aside from Red Hat and Gentoo. Every now and then I give linux another shot and usually stumble upon some small, deal-breaking issue (Missing wireless driver, or missing SATA driver - dumb stuff like that). However, it has been a while so I'll give it another shot.
* I'm grossly aware of the limitations of a VM, do not worry.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
What do you think "self-opinionated" means?
I do not think it means... well, anything at all.
I'd login to downvote but I don't have source to my keyboard's microcontroller.
Postgresql gets by fine without a poster-boy (or even a name that anyone can pronounce).
Let's see..
Linus Torvalds
Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Keith Bostic
Richard Stallman
What do they all have in common?
Whenever I see someone say "We need a Linus", they aren't talking about a central design brain behind a product. They are talking about someone who successfully negotiated a field full of landmines while getting bombed from the air and sniped at from the wings.
OpenStack is exactly where Unix-like OS's were in 1991 as they were trying to break free from Vendor lock-in. We have a mesh of Linux, Minix, 386BSD, BSD386, netNSD, GNU Hurd, and any number of assorted equivalent projects going on right now. While the basic framework is very similar, there are so many specific technical variations and multiple approaches that it is kinda silly thinking everyone is going to fall in line behind a single developer or architect. It is even sillier when you realize this isn't being driven by hobbyists, but large commercial interests - who generally like vendor lock-in and have billions of dollars on the line.
There is no Linus type figure right now. There isn't even a Stallman out there right now. Or Jolitz. It is a standards body fight. And, the only thing they need to do is define open API's and enforce a certification and revoke certifications for people who try to implement undocumented API's.
OpenStack is not nearly worth the buzz it is receiving. Its a great setup for managing virtual deployments and networked storage but nothing new. Its probably the most complex implementation of the included technologies but certainly not the only one. Swift is a great amazon-like API storage system and probably the most notable part of the OpenStack project. Nova provides a good combined openvz/kvm/etc virtualization setup but there are plenty of others with equal features. The tying of these technologies together is nice and works good but again nothing new here. While the project is definitely one anyone looking into cloud storage/virtualization these days is aware of, its not something significant enough to say Linus should head or even be involved in. His opinion is always welcome but I would hope we are keeping that mans time spent on more important endeavors. When it comes to virtualization I think working on moving things like OpenVZ up from 2.6 kernel into the 3.x kernel series is a better time-sink.
http://interserver.net/
Has always worked through school.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The tech press thinks that OpenStack needs a Linus because the press likes telling narratives about colorful quotable characters because those are easy pieces of content to write, and they sell copy.
The OpenStack project has a number of mutually cooperating teams of people with advanced "groupware" tooling that are doing Just Fine at performing the kind of operational day to day tech direction leadership and patch selection and merging that Linus does for the Linux project.
Well I hope I gave you enough info to figure out whether WSUS is right for you.
As far as the "Hairyfeet challenge"? I'll admit its a little dramatic but frankly it illustrates perfectly that the Linux followers suffer from the "is ought" problem, they look at their OS as how it OUGHT to be and NOT what it IS, which is fiddly as hell, and with a ton of developers that treat critical system components as their own personal playtoys.
As I've pointed out with the challenge even what would be considered a VERY under-average user, just using what comes with the system, no new hardware,no new software, just what comes with the OS, you will STILL end up with a fundamentally broken system. At least with Windows you can FIRE THEM by simply refusing to buy, as was done with Vista and I'm betting will be done with Win 8, but how do you fire the Pulse guys? X11? Torvalds? You can't so you are just screwed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.