Foundation¶

This is a brainstorming document and is subject to the outcome of the Red Hat acquisition of Inktank (and the Ceph IP). There are some very good arguments to be made for single-vendor Open Source projects, and those discussions have yet to occur as a part of the merger.

Housing the Ceph project within a Foundation setting would ensure that the community is empowered to make good technical decisions and coordinate efforts across the industry. Below is a rough outline of what the goals and responsibilities of a Ceph Foundation might look like.

Responsibilities:¶

• Project Governance
• Development process and release management
• Developer, user, and ecosystem community management
• Centralized clearinghouse for engineering work
• Brand management (PR, marketing, trademark)
• Event management (Ceph days, CDS, meetups, etc)
• Legal affairs

Protecting¶

• The Ceph software by ensuring it remains freely available by facilitating the open development process
• The trademark
• The core values of the Ceph community, such as:
• Respecting and appreciating the individuals and organizations who contribute in various ways, including testing, documenting,
  translating, integrating, extending, educating, financing, training, supporting, facilitating, evangelizing, designing, and art making.
• Respecting the meritocracy which guides decision making.
• Encouraging economic opportunity in the Ceph ecosystem.

Empowering¶

• Developers to write great code without overly painful process or tools in a way that takes care of the legal issues
• Developers by training them to become better Free Software contributors
• Developers by providing access to a set of reference platforms, including for large-scale testing
• Users to have access to great software and provide feedback and input on the direction
• Community members of all sorts to organize events, information, discussions and other activities and resources
• Companies to build a powerful and profitable ecosystem and marketplace around the software that creates new business
  opportunities and feeds the long-term health of Ceph
• Users, by educating them on the best uses for the Ceph software

Promoting¶

• The software produced
• The developers producing it
• The users using it
• The marketplace of businesses built with or around the software

If there was a Ceph Foundation, it should:

• Provide resources for developers
  • Teuthology instances
  • Package build farms
  • Shared hardware test lab
    • for running teuthology QA
    • for vendors to contirube hardware for testing and eval
  • ...

• Organize Ceph Developer Summits
  • Define the roadmap
  • Discuss feature implementation details
  • ...

• Decide the governance
  • Development workflow (reviews, merge rights etc.)
  • Release cycle
  • What is part of Ceph what is not
  • Own the Ceph trademark and thus logos
  • Host the Ceph website and repository
  • ...