[ovirt-users] Re: Alternative Perspective - Re: oVirt alternatives

At the risk of sounding like a Red Hat or IBM fanboy, I have decided to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt here, and to not make any decisions about switching off of oVirt until and unless an official announcement is made.

In the meantime, I know that I need to move off of Gluster (and I made that decision before the Gluster announcement), and I would need storage with any other solution anyway, so that's where I'm going to focus my own efforts.

In the meantime, while I realize that the optics of a company like IBM / Red Hat shutting a project like oVirt down looks bad to the FOSS community, I'm going to push back a little bit. We have had access to a FOSS application that obviously works for a lot of people. No company is required to provide their services for free, and likewise, I'm of the opinion that one needs to be willing to pay (or contribute in some way) for a quality product service. It reminds me of the mantra: "Fast, Cheap, Free - pick two".

So here's an alternative perspective: What can the community contribute and do in order to keep the project going? Anyone could fork it, rebrand it, and run with it. 

I claim to be a software developer, and the uplink in my datacenter is only 100mbps right now (of course I can increase it when needed), so I doubt I could provide much value in terms of hosting or coding.

But I do know security. I'm a Linux systems engineer with over 10 years of experience. I know website content management systems. And people have told me that I'm good at documentation. So I think I have a lot of skill sets that I could "offer" (albeit I don't have much time, and as we all know, time is money. I've been dealing with a serious personal matter since beginning of December, and I'm effectively an acting single parent at the moment).

I'll end this the way I started: I'm going to wait to see what happens before I personally make any decisions to change my entire underlying virtualization infrastructure. In the meantime, I'll continue to work on what I can control - the underlying storage. And if oVirt does shutdown in the future, I'd love to have a conversation with anyone interested in helping out to fork the project and keep it running. 

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