I was wondering how I was going to respond and I had to read your message a couple of times to make sure I absorbed it, but when I came to the discuss to reply, it all became clear right from the discuss user interface:
Itâs been a while since weâve seen CEHENKLE â their last post was 7 months ago.
Forgive me for being so blunt, but is this really the person who is genuinely asking how you can communicate with the community better? There seems to be a systemic issue with communication. The lack of involvement of the actual performers of work in threads such as this one is evidence of it. A start might be that people interacting with the project actually communicating those things in a forum where people can see them instead of behind Amazon servers? Why not just tell everyone (including Amazon employees) that if the topic pertains to this project, this forum (or some other designated public place) is the place to have that conversation? Isnât that how most successful open source projects work? Wasnât it in Amazonâs own press release about OpenSearch that the following was stated (in April 2021):
We are truly excited about the potential for OpenSearch to be a community endeavor, where anyone can contribute to it, influence it, and make decisions together about its future. Community development, at its best, lets people with diverse interests have a direct hand in guiding and building products they will use; this results in products that meet their needs better than anything else.
It is crystal clear that the vast majority of communication regarding this project isnât happening in public. How can you be uncertain why there is poor communication if people arenât using open discussion forums to discuss elements important to the product? How can we achieve the stated aim to âmake decisions togetherâ when basic information isnât being discussed as a community?
I also have some trouble fully accepting your explanation about FPM. Although shockingly little has been shared with the community, it appears that the FPM issue was known about, at the very least, in November 2021. It seems that was what @searchymcsearchface was referring to in his posts there. Here is what I am referring to:
(Again, of course, since all this happened in private, it is really tough to sort out what happened here - I am sure you have the access one would need to figure it out). By the way, I am still waiting for the 12 page design document that @searchymcsearchface told us was coming, unless I missed its publication somewhere:
I will also note that I tend to believe @searchymcsearchface when he said (in September 2021):
This also seems to be confirmed by dblock in the github issue, speaking about the RPM function for 1.0 release:
Nobody was working on RPM then, but we should have been able to answer signing questions in general, apologies.
Just look at what all the OpenSearch team has achieved since the announcement in April 2021 and GA in July of 2021. And just look at what you are planning in less than ten months: Two first-digit releases! Are you really suggesting that a team that is capable of that much isnât capable of releasing an RPM? First, let me assure you I am not trying to dismiss the craft of release engineering. It is a discipline and portion of software engineering that is often paid short shift. It isnât the most alluring part of the process, by most engineers measure, but absolutely essential. @searchymcsearchface himself repeated the importance of the issue to community repeatedly, such as (in Sep 2021):
But, how can a reasonable person looking from afar and the information on the table come back with anything other than the conclusion that this isnât really a feature that is important to the OpenSearch team? We all deal with limited resources and a lot of worthy, competing elements needing attention. The OpenSearch team has continuously deprioritized this issue, almost exclusively by communicating days AFTER a release target has been missed how important this issue was and how some totally unexpected thing made it impossible to deliver.
I also have to beg to differ about your statements about âcollecting community feedbackâ and âupdating the issueâ. These statements seem to be aimed at showing how good the efforts were engaging the community. However, please note that even though release was aimed for 1.0, that the issue you referenced wasnât even opened until January 2022. What about the litany of basic questions that were simply ignored on that thread or the original #27:
Will packages be signed with SHA-256?
What repo will they be served out of?
Even just a basic: âDoes that mean we wonât actually be seeing RPMs at the opensearch 1.3 release?â wasnât answered.
This might be the right time to say that your closing comment really took me by surprise:
I think you might have said the quiet part out loud: You seem to be conflating the âweâ with âAmazonâ, not OpenSearch. Where is that community effort that was being sought after? I have said before, and I will say again, that it is totally Amazonâs prerogative how they spend money/resources/effort. If Amazon wanted to take all the effort/code/outputs they are expending behind their curtain, that is certainly within their rights. I am not a opensource fanatic/zealot screaming we are entitled to those products. However, please also donât make statements (such as the one in your January 2021 press release I referenced earlier) that you donât intend to keep. If you really want community involvement and a tool useful to the community then you will have to let that happen. If that is no longer what Amazon (or this project) desires, then put out a press release that says that, shut down this site, and let the community respond to the hole that exists (Just as you responded when Elastic made its announcement). But please, donât tease the community with a solution to a problem and then leave it hanging for at a bare minimum 10 months. Which leads me to my next point:
In reading your message, I can discern no project commitments, nor timelines to release this critical feature. In fact, moving it to a milestone which has no target doesnât seem like the move of a project that sees this feature as important. Look at the length of this thread alone! This canât have been a âfirst heardâ just now. I am confused why even after all the focus the project is so uncertain as to the completion that you canât provide any information as to the time of release? And, please, donât take this the wrong way, but in a sense I donât care about what you say in your response about the timeline. The actions or inactions of the project have, and will continue to, speak far louder than any of the words I or you type on this thread.
In summary, I am not really sure what I expect as a response. As my earlier comment stated, I have kind of lost all enthusiasm for this project. I certainly donât mean to be a nasty internet troll nor to make your day any worse. The whole thing is just kind of sad to me as a missed opportunity.