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AUSTIN, Texas—In the standard philosophy that has defined open-source since its earliest days, developers simply “scratch an itch” for things they want done, rather than follow predefined product roadmaps. At the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, this week, one of the things that was discussed was the emergence of the OpenStack Foundation roadmap effortto help provide visibility into what is coming next for the cloud.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, discusses his views on the roadmap effort and how he expects it to evolve.
While OpenStack has not previously had a formal roadmap, there are multiple technical items, including community blueprints and feature requests that have been used since OpenStack was first created in 2010, that do serve to provide some direction.
“In a software company, product managers can go and dictate a roadmap and define what resources will work on specific efforts,” Bryce said. “You can’t do that in open-source.”
The OpenStack roadmap effort isn’t trying to dictate a roadmap either, but rather is attempting to collate all the different sources of information about what contributors and operators are doing or want to do, as they build OpenStack. Bryce noted that the OpenStack roadmap effort is providing a prioritized view of what people are talking about in the community.
“I would give us a ‘D’ right now in terms of the grade and how well it’s working because it’s our first iteration,” Bryce said. “For us, the roadmap team is about collecting information from developers and users so people have good data about what is being worked on.”
Watch the full video interview with Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.