The Four Opens

Open Source

We do not produce “open core” software.

We are committed to creating truly open source software that is usable and scalable. Truly open source software is not feature or performance limited. There will be no “Enterprise Edition”.

We use the Apache License, 2.0.

Open Design

We are committed to an open design process. Every development cycle the OpenStack community holds face-to-face events to gather requirements and write specifications for the upcoming release. Those events, which are open to anyone, include users, developers, and upstream projects. We gather requirements, define priorities and flesh out technical design to guide development for the next development cycle.

The community controls the design process. You can help make this software meet your needs.

Open Development

We maintain a publicly available source code repository through the entire development process. We do public code reviews. We have public roadmaps. This makes participation simpler, allows users to follow the development process and participate in QA at an early stage.

Open Community

One of our core goals is to maintain a healthy, vibrant developer and user community. Most decisions are made using a lazy consensus model. All processes are documented, open and transparent.

The technical governance of the project is provided by the community itself, with contributors electing team leads and members of the Technical Committee.

All project meetings are held in public IRC channels and recorded. Additional technical communication is through public mailing lists and is archived.