governance/reference/new-projects-requirements.rst

Requirements for new OpenStack Project applications

Teams in OpenStack can be created as-needed and grow organically. By becoming an official OpenStack Project, they place themselves under the authority of the OpenStack Technical Committee. In return, their contributors get to vote in the Technical Committee election.

Official project teams are documented in the reference/projects.yaml file from the openstack/governance repository. To propose an addition or a change, propose the corresponding projects.yaml file change for review.

When considering new projects for addition, the TC will check that:

• The project aligns with the OpenStack Mission: The project must have a clear and defined scope. It should either:
  • help further the OpenStack mission <technical-vision> by providing a cloud service;
  • help further the OpenStack mission by providing a service for operators of OpenStack clouds;
  • provide deployment and lifecycle management tooling for OpenStack;
  • provide packaging recipes to be used when deploying OpenStack;
  • provide client-side tools to enable users to interact with OpenStack; or
  • provide integration to enable adjacent systems to interoperate with OpenStack.
• The project follows the OpenStack way ("the 4 opens"):
  • Open Source:
    • The proposed project uses an open source license (preferably the Apache v2.0 license, since it is necessary if the project wants to be used in an OpenStack trademark program)
    • The project must have no library dependencies which effectively restrict how the project may be distributed or deployed
  • Open Community:
    • The leadership is chosen by the contributors to the project
    • If the project has meetings, regular or otherwise, they should be public and in IRC. They should all be logged and published. Project teams have discretion as to where meetings are held. They can be in the project specific IRC channel, if it exists or one of the general meeting channels available. The advantage of hosting meetings in the project specific channel is that project participants not present can catch-up more easily. Whereas holding the meeting in a general channel gives extra visibility and makes it easier to ping other contributors.
    • The project shall provide a level and open collaboration playing field for all contributors. The project shall not benefit a single vendor, or a single vendors product offerings; nor advantage contributors from a single vendor organization due to access to source code, hardware, resources or other proprietary technology available only to those contributors.
  • Open Development:
    • The project uses public code reviews on the OpenStack infrastructure
    • The project has core reviewers and adopts a test-driven gate in the OpenStack infrastructure for changes
    • The project provides liaisons that serve as contacts for the work of cross-project teams in OpenStack
    • Where it makes sense, the project cooperates with existing projects rather than gratuitously competing or reinventing the wheel
    • Where appropriate, the project adopts technology and patterns used by existing OpenStack projects
  • Open Design:
    • The project direction is discussed at the Design Summit and/or on public forums
    • The project uses the openstack-dev ML to discuss issues
• The project ensures basic interoperability with the rest of OpenStack: User-facing API services should support Keystone for discovery and authentication.
• The project has an active team of one or more contributors.
• The project participates in any goals specified by the TC, as defined by release-cycle-goals. Any existing goals that are not met should be prioritized and completed within the first year of a team joining.
• The project meets any policies that the TC requires all projects to meet. For instance, the project-testing-interface.

In order to do an evaluation against this criteria, the TC expects the project to be set up and have some history to evaluate. A few months of operating and following these project requirements is a rough guideline for how long to wait before applying to be approved by the TC.

However, in order to facilitate adoption of existing established projects, candidate projects may ask the Technical Committee for an early answer on the question of alignment with the OpenStack Mission, before the project is set up on OpenStack development infrastructure.

If the project has not followed the 4 Opens since its inception - i.e. it was seeded with the release of a pre-existing code base - then the TC may look for evidence of active engagement from the community, beyond the original authors. If the community did not get the opportunity to contribute to the earliest decisions (which are usually the hardest to change), then a lack of subsequent community engagement is of greater concern, as it may indicate that the project only meets the needs of a single organisation. Projects that have always followed the 4 Opens are not subject to any particular standard of community engagement.

Once a project has joined OpenStack, it may create additional source code repositories as needed at the discretion of its Project Team Lead (PTL) without prior approval from the TC as long as the additional source code repositories fall within the scope of the approved project mission statement.

Releases of OpenStack deliverables are handled by the OpenStack Release Management team through the openstack/releases repository. Official projects are expected to relinquish direct tagging (and branch creation) rights in their Gerrit ACLs once their release jobs are functional.

Official project teams are expected to participate in all elections held after the team is accepted as official, regardless of how recently the team leadership may have been established.