This is the common OpenStack meme for coverage. Each Summit there’s more and more users - “customers” - but it will take a while before OpenStack is suddenly us an “overnight success.”

Looking at it from a different perspective, OpenStack is one of the biggest, new model for open source development: they’re iterating on the concept and mechanics of open source in new and novel ways, deep in bazaar mode vs. Fred Brook’s surgeon model, to mix metaphors and ages.

I think it’s best to think of OpenStack as a continuation of the Eclipse model, that isn’t really too explicit about it: the point of the overall effort is to provide and commoditize all the common components needed to make cloud software. The vendors - be try ISVs, service providers, or SIs - who take those common components make most of “the real” products (not all, of course). If there happens to be a fully functional cloud platform as a result apart from vendors, even better.

What’s incorrect in my comparison is that this doesn’t seem to be the explicit mission of the community. Indeed, I think holding back from a strong mission like that is intentional: and that’s where the OpenStack is more like the ASF. Unlike the ASF, the OpenStack community isn’t opposed to profit and business; those ASF guys seems allergic to it (which maps to their mission perfectly well).

Hence, it’s all sort of new. I don’t really know what “The Model” is yet.

See also Nancy’s piece on the meme.

The great OpenStack conundrum: with 15,000 members, why is adoption lagging?