I am honestly surprised about the reaction to the article on Red Hat’s support clause (or lack-off) around non-Red Hat distributions of OpenStack. Here is my take
- Support clause
Almost all vendors (Red Hat, Canonical, SUSE, Solaris) have support clause restricted only to their distributions. There is no reason to single out Red Hat on this. Each vendor needs to promote their interests while promoting common interest.
- Interoperability?
Is this against the principle of interoperability that OpenStack promises? Yes to an extent, but not fully. If they are actively blocking non-Red Hat versions working with Red Hat versions, it would be a complete No No for me. But they are not. (On the other hand, Solaris actively blocks non Solaris guests running on their OpenStack. No body talks about it :))
But, expecting Red Hat to support non-Red Hat product is lame.
I would like to ask end users the use case where they would/ need to have multiple clouds running multiple versions of OpenStack together. Do you run one? If not, why are you worried about this clause?
- Is this being a bad citizen?
No. As a community, OpenStack enables everyone to win. Yes, this means a customer to get restricted to one vendor version of OpenStack, but that customer has already made up her mind to go with a certain version of OpenStack. Otherwise, she would have chosen the latest from GitHub Ultimately, one needs to get back to code and help to get the next version of OpenStack out.
For all the bad talk against them, Red Hat has been the top contributor for the past few releases, across most of the OpenStack projects.
- Should Foundation get in between?
No. Big No. It is not the job of the foundation to get in between participating vendors. It needs to focus on ways to work together, and it is doing it. If they choose to market in a way suiting to their needs, that is their decision.
- Written just to get page views
This article is written just to create controversy. What is the deal about “reviewing documents”. All the support clauses are on Red Hat site (and other vendors too). Nothing is behind the scene. And it has been around for at least few months now. If someone writes just to create controversy with no no substance, I would like to ignore.
So, please stop beating Red Hat on this.