Thank you all for sharing your questions and opinions about the new scenario that we’ll be putting in place after the release of OpenNebula 5.12 “Firework”. Here you have some clarifications on the two topics that seem to generate more interest/confusion:
Access to the packages repo on GitHub:
From now on, for each Major, Minor and Maintenance release of the Community Edition we’ll be providing the traditional set of official binary/source packages for the main distributions. Still, those members of the community interested in creating public packages of the CE for other distros, or with specific open source projects that require access to the packages template repo, are very welcome to request access. For everyone else, we’ll probably have to evaluate on an individual basis. After the release of “Firework” we’ll set up an on-line procedure for this, but if any of you have, for whatever reason, an urgent need to access the packages repo, please send me a private message to community-manager@opennebula.io explaining your situation and I’ll be happy to assist you.
Access to the migrators:
As I mentioned in my original post, migrators for upgrading from one stable release to another will only be available in principle for corporate users with an active OpenNebula Subscription and access to the Enterprise Edition. This is one of the features we believe customers deserve as part of their commitment to the sustainability of the project. While projects like OpenStack are financed by large vendors that create their own commercial distributions to compete against each other, we rely solely on the financial support we receive from customers. Organizations with non-commercial deployments can always request free access to the migrators, but we expect companies with production environments to play a much more active role from now on in supporting the project. They can do that either financially (purchasing an OpenNebula Subscription) or by making some significant contribution to the community (which we’ll also have to evaluate on an individual basis), such as sharing their improvements under an open source license… In sum, we don’t expect these changes to lead to more fragmentation, but rather to more constructive commitment 