Starting an open source project is easy. Running a successful project, on the other hand, comes with a lot of work and responsibilities, especially if the project attracts a large user base. While open source projects come in all shapes and forms, most projects encounter a similar set of growth issues throughout their life cycles. Because of this, various organizations have arisen to help projects handle these problems; these organizations are generally known as FOSS foundations. This primer covers non-technical aspects that the majority of projects will have to consider at some point. It also explains how FOSS foundations can help projects grow and succeed.
He has also posted a separate research report [PDF] on foundations that support open-source projects.
A developer meet-up for OpenStack, known as PTG, occurred a week ago. I attended the Swift track, where somewhat to my surprise we had two new contributors show up.
I got into a habit of telling people that I did not want Swift to end like AFS: develop great software and dead, with nobody using it. Today I looked it up, and what do you know: OpenAFS made a release in June 2020 (and apparently they also screwed up and had to post an emergency release in October).
So, I was chatting with Matt O. at PTG and he said, "oh yeah, we won some contracts when I was at SuSE, Swift was beating the competition." Not entirely a surprise, but it got me thinking: is it too early to declare Swift dead, or even AFS level dead?
Since NVIDIA gobbled up Swift, I was full of concerns for the centralization. NVIDIA uses Swift as a hyperscaler, in support of their own clusters. They already started to divest themselves from Swiftstack's customer base. I envisioned a future where NVIDIA assembles all the core contributors, then fires them all and closes the project. But then I learned that Lustre went through a cycle like that, being acquired, but then sold out to a smaller, more focused company (to DDN).
To sum, I see a possibility for Swift to remain relevant through a three-step strategy, if you will. First, Swift remains open, aligned to technology, and performant. Thanks to that, it wins new deployments (in HPC and Telco in particular). And because of the field use, it will find a corporate stewardship. So, basically, suck less for success.
P.S. Also at PTG I learned that S3 Inventory existed. Seemed like implementing it in Swift could be a satisfying accomplishment for someone new.
Amusingly, one of their attempts to submit a buggy commit was, itself, buggy, yielding a valid change overall.
So I think the GPLv2 is pretty much the perfect balance of "everybody works under the same rules", and still requires that people give back to the community ("tit-for-tat"). And everybody knows that all the other people involved are bound by the same rules, so it's all very equitable and fair.
Of course, another part of that is that you also get out what you put in. Sure, you can try to "coast" on the project and be just a user, and that's ok. But if you do that, you also have no control over the project. That can be perfectly fine too, if you really just need a basic operating system, and Linux already does everything you want. But if you have special requirements, the only way to really affect the project is to participate.