One of the interesting things about AWS Firecracker is that it is (one of?) the first OSS projects *originated* by AWS. It will be interesting to see how outside contributions and community are curated. Some comments after a 2 minute look at the repo/docs:
First, there is a Code of Conduct (github.com/firecracker-mi…). It is very corporate though where violations are reported to an amazon alias. If a real community forms it'll be interesting to see if this shifts to be a community driven thing.
The MAINTAINERS.md (github.com/firecracker-mi…) lists the Amazon team working on it. Doesn't look like there is provision for external maintainers.
There are clear guidelines for contributing. These list out the typical workflow and expectations of a PR. See CONTRIBUTING.md (github.com/firecracker-mi…).
One thing missing from firecracker is either the DCO or a CLA. This is very surprising! One of these is typical when accepting any outside contributions. I expect to see this fixed ASAP once external PRs start coming in. Will be interesting to see what they pick.
(FWIW, I'm not a fan of CLAs that are owned by commercial companies. It gives the company free reign to re-license in the future and dual license. The chrome VMM base will prevent that in this case and isnt' as big an issue with Apache 2.0. IANAL tho.)
Summary of Firecracker from OSS community PoV: looks like a great start but some missing pieces. Clearly not going to be community driven (like k8s, Apache, OpenStack) but rather vendor driven. Not "throw it over the wall" OSS though (chrome, android). Looking forward to more!
Oh! One thing I forgot -- there is a pre-submit check on PRs that leads to an AWS login screen. Looks like you have to be an Amazon employee (or have an AWS login?) to see the presubmit checks?
Kubernetes had (and still has but is working on it!) the issue where the OSS block and tackle was still overly tied to Google internal systems. It has been super hard to unwind that over time. Hopefully they'll run all the build/release/test infra for this in the open too.
