SDxCentral report that AT&T T 17,13 +0,22 +1,30% are moving away from Juniper’s JNPR 30,15 +0,57 +1,93% Contrail orchestration platform to OpenDaylight, citing that the lack community engagement in the platform. Can Contrail work as open-source without community?
According to SDxCentral’s report, Paul Carver, a principle member of AT&T’s technical staff, expressed frustration that the lack of a community was hindering the development of OpenContrail, and could lead to AT&T moving to a platform with a larger community.
From my perspective, it is not simply enough to dump code into the outside world and claim that ‘We are open-source’, but you must strive to build a community to make that development happen. And for developers, they are going to engage with a community that is active, and building features that are most needed.
This tends to drive development to one or two big projects, and you as a developer have to have a very good need to break away from that community. Indeed OpenDaylight has lots of activity from several people recorded in thier OpenDaylight Gerrit interface, similarly, OpenContrail has both activity and people in their OpenContrail Gerrit.
The key is are all these people from the same corporate culture, or are they from different organisations with different requirements and viewpoints, maximising the pool of ideas to be selected from?
SDxCentral’s original report: AT&T’s ‘Nirvana Stack’ uses ODL rather than Contrail.
