Merge "Polish the Introduction of the Four Opens book"

doc/source/introduction.rst

@@ -2,21 +2,51 @@
 Introduction
 ============
 
-Where do the Four Opens originate from? They came from a need to do things
-differently.
+
+This book is for the lost souls to guide them through the intricacies,
+challenges and joys of building, maintaining, supporting and participating in
+well balanced and sustainable open source communities.
+
+Open source has become a loaded term over the past few decades while many
+people still associate it with free software. While the access to source code
+is directly implied in the term, under various license options that this book
+will not discuss, the focus is shifting towards how the software gets created
+by communities that are formed by a group of individuals who need to be able
+to work together in an open environment while they often employed by companies
+that are competitors.
+
+What is the key to success to make open collaboration successful? How can you
+participate in a community and help make it thrive? What are the most
+important principles to follow during your journey?
+
+This book will give you answers to these questions by describing a set of
+guiding principles called The Four Opens that was originally defined by the
+OpenStack community and helped them as well as other projects to thrive in the
+open source ecosystem.
+
+
+History
+-------
+
+Before jumping in the middle of The Four Opens let’s have a short tour in
+history to understand where the need and the ideas came from. Originally, they
+came from a need to do things differently.
 
 Free software started in the 80’s by defining four (initially three)
 freedoms [#fourfreedoms]_ that any free software should grant its
-users. Freedom
-0 was the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. Freedom 1
-was the freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your
-computing as you wish. Freedom 2 was the freedom to redistribute copies so you
-can help your neighbor. Freedom 3 was the freedom to distribute copies of your
-modified versions to others. Those freedoms made you free to improve the
-program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole
-community benefits.  But free software did not mandate anything about how the
-software was to be built to actually encourage this collaboration across
-boundaries that would result in benefiting the whole community.
+users:
+
+* Freedom 0: freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
+* Freedom 1: freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does
+  your computing as you wish
+* Freedom 2: freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
+* Freedom 3: freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
+
+These freedoms made the participants free to improve the program, and release
+their improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.  But
+free software did not mandate anything about how the software was to be built
+to actually encourage this collaboration across boundaries that would result
+in benefiting the whole community.
 
 When open source was defined in 1998, it focused on a specific angle (the one
 that mattered the most to businesses), which is the availability and
@@ -41,39 +71,42 @@ improvement (like security or scalability) that the controlling entity would
 prefer to keep for its Enterprise edition. All this control ultimately hurts
 the adoption and the success of the software.
 
-OpenStack was started with the belief that a community of equals, working
-together in an open collaboration, would produce better software, more aligned
-to the needs of its users and more largely adopted. It was therefore started
-from day 0 as an open collaboration willing to include as many individuals and
-organizations as possible, on a level playing field, with everyone involved in
-designing the solution. This was relatively novel: while a few venerable
-projects like the Linux kernel were set up and perdured as truly open
-collaborations, most new projects in 2010 were just owned by a "main sponsor"
-This is why it was pretty important for us to state in a very concise way what
-we really meant by Open. It was also important to clearly distinguish ourselves
-from prevalent open core solutions like Eucalyptus, which was then the only
-open source cloud infrastructure platform available.
+OpenStack is an open source community that was started with the belief that a
+community of equals, working together in an open collaboration, would produce
+better software, more aligned to the needs of its users and more largely
+adopted. It was therefore started from the first day as an open collaboration
+willing to include as many individuals and organizations as possible, on a
+level playing field, with everyone involved in designing and developing the
+solution.
+
+This was relatively novel: while a few venerable projects like the Linux kernel
+were set up and perdured as truly open collaborations, most new projects in
+2010 were just owned by a "main sponsor". This is why it was pretty important
+for the individuals who participated in the OpenStack community to state in a
+very concise way what they really meant by 'open'. It was also important to
+clearly distinguish themselves from prevalent open core solutions like
+Eucalyptus, which was then the only open source cloud infrastructure platform
+available.
 
 It was from these conditions that "The Four Opens" were born. The first public
 mention of them was posted on the then-nascent OpenStack Wiki on June 28,
 2010 [#fouropenswiki]_, before OpenStack was even publicly discussed or
-announced. The titles of the Four Opens (Open source, Open Design, Open
+announced. The titles of the Four Opens (Open Source, Open Design, Open
 Development, Open Community) were set from that day. The content evolved a bit
 over time on the Wiki, as implementation details rolled in (for example: public
 code reviews, design summits, technical committee, lazy and consensus). The
 Four Opens description is now maintained officially in the OpenStack governance
-web-site [#fouropens]_.
-
-After eight years, the Four Opens proved pretty resilient, consistently
-managing to capture the "OpenStack Way" of doing upstream open source
-development. Under their rule, the OpenStack community grew from tens of
-contributors to thousands. They were instrumental in the success, the quality
-and the visibility of the OpenStack software. As this book will show, they also
-proved applicable to downstream activities such as user feedback gathering,
-marketing, or event management. As the OpenStack Foundation turns to more
-generally support Open Infrastructure, the Four Opens will grow beyond
-OpenStack. Let's apply them to other nascent open source projects with the same
-success.
+website [#fouropens]_ and followed by several projects in the open source
+ecosystem.
+
+They were instrumental in the success, the quality and the visibility of the
+OpenStack software as well as the growth of the community from tens of
+contributors to thousands over the course of a few years.
+
+As this book will show how The Four Opens transform open source into open
+collaboration that is essential to create open source software and other
+artifacts by a group of individuals and organizations who have a set of common
+goals and challenges they choose to solve together.
 
 .. [#fourfreedoms] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
 .. [#fouropenswiki] https://wiki.openstack.org/w/index.php?title=Open&oldid=9628