[Ovirt-devel] roadmap & development

[Darryl L. Pierce]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2011 at 03:35:44PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> I think Anthony has a good point. There was initially a lot of buzz and
> excitement around oVirt but, if someone came upon the project now,
> they'd be forgiven for wondering why things have gone so quiet.
> 
> It's probably obvious to anyone following the project closely what has
> happened - most of the developers on the project were from Red Hat and
> when Red Hat acquired Qumranet in September 2008, Red Hat's focus
> started moving towards releasing what eventually became RHEV.
> 
> Since ovirt-node is the upstream of RHEV-H and ovirt-server isn't a part
> of RHEV, Red Hat folks gradually stopped working on ovirt-server. This
> happened quietly and without any fuss since I guess everyone hoped the
> project would continue to flourish. This could have been handled better.
> 
> Despite the best efforts of Arthur, Michel, Nicolas and Simon
> ovirt-server has gone very quiet and there hasn't been a new release
> since May.
> 
> You're probably asking what this has to do with me? Well, I've been
> working on RHEV-M this past year (e.g. see rhevm-api[1]) and hope that
> RHEV-M will be open-sourced without too much more delay.
> 
> An idea that has occurred to a few of us is that this could be a great
> opportunity to re-invigorate and re-launch the oVirt project. That would
> mean adding the RHEV-M codebase to oVirt (as ovirt-manager, perhaps) and
> kick-starting oVirt again.

I think this would be an outstanding path to take. I've kept in touch
with several users of oVirt server and know that the lot of them are
very interested in what we're doing behind the scenes.

> The tricky part of this is what would happen the ovirt-server codebase.
> Would it end up just being deprecated, or some people might be
> interested in re-factoring it into a frontend UI talking to
> ovirt-manager. I don't know.
> 
> This is just an idea. Maybe it's a terrible one. Perhaps folks here feel
> they could continue to build upon ovirt-server and make oVirt a kick-ass
> community again?
> 
> I only ever watched oVirt from the sidelines and I thought it rocked. I
> really believe that we could make oVirt rock again with this idea.
> 
> Thoughts?

I agree that we could pump new life into the project by open sourcing
what we have in RHEVM and providing a clean, documented API to the
oVirt server project. Several of the users on upstream oVirt are adept
RoR programmers who would jump at the chance to work on this, and they
have communicated that to me, that they hope whatever we're doing will
get opened up soon for them to use.

-- 
Darryl L. Pierce, Sr. Software Engineer @ Red Hat, Inc.
Delivering value year after year.
Red Hat ranks #1 in value among software vendors.
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