Guest: Ildiko Vancsa (LinkedIn)
Foundation: OpenInfra Foundation (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk @ Open Source Summit North America

The term “open source” has become so popular that people have been using it for marketing. New projects sometimes become single-vendor projects because their main motivation for putting the code out there is just to qualify as open source, not really on building something together with others who are trying to solve the same or very similar challenge.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the Open Source Summit in Vancouver, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Ildiko Vancsa, Director of Community at the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), to talk about the Foundation’s presence at the Summit, the importance of participating in open-source communities, and what’s happening with the StarlingX Project.

Highlights of this video interview:

• Vancsa states that her presentation at the Summit, entitled “What is Open Source Without Collaboration,” is a call-to-action about the importance of participating in open-source communities. A lot of companies are consuming open source, but they don’t always participate in it, and they don’t always give back.
• It is important to get educated about the principles of open source. It’s not really all about the code. It is about the collaboration that happens around the code, what is supposed to happen, and all that the communication, the learning that you can get from it.
• Vancsa is the community manager for the StarlingX project and she works with the contributors as well as newcomers who want to participate and understand the ecosystem. Part of her job at the OpenInfra Foundation is to work with member companies and organizations to make sure that they are able to participate.

The Foundation will host the OpenInfra Summit next month, also in Vancouver. The event will have three main pillars:

• Regular conference sessions, presentations, panel discussions, which will involve community-related topics as well.
• The Forum, which is a set of interactive sessions around a particular topic and which creates a feedback loop between users and developers.
• The Community Blueprint, the goal of which is to collect stories, experiences that people are having in the open-source ecosystem, and build on those stories by showing how they can improve.

The evolution of the StarlingX Project:

• One of the big changes since the inception of the project 5 years ago was fully containerizing the infrastructure. The platform is deploying infrastructure services in containers, which provides flexibility and manageability.
• It is a fully integrated cloud platform that can be used to build infrastructure either in a large data center or in a distributed environment.
• It provides a set of standard APIs through open-source components that people already know and use very actively.
• The StarlingX community is also working on adding components to the open-source projects that they are integrating with. That set of components are called the Flock Services, which provide automation management type of components (e.g., software management, infrastructure management, fault management) that you need to be able to efficiently deploy and operate a large-scale infrastructure.
• The platform is popular in 5G and OpenRAN deployments of large telecom operators because it provides support for precision time protocol. Time synchronization is important for these mission-critical systems.
• Though the project is not specialized for telecom, it shows how the strict telecom requirements are applicable to other StarlingX use cases such as industrial automation and automotive.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.