No Open Blockers

Zeus pointed out that today marks the 1 year birthday of Spacewalk being announced. He mentions some of the technical accomplishments made during that time, but there are a few other aspects I find important:

• Like he mentions, there have been 5 releases in that time. Even though the code is derived from Satellite, that’s a really impressive turn around for a new project, both from a technical standpoint (getting the build structure in place, adjusting to the new tools involved in being open) and from a management standpoint (moving to a model of rapid releases from much slower production releases is a bit shift in thinking).
• The community is alive and kicking after just one year. It’s awesome to see users answering other users on the Spacewalk mailing list. The Freenode chat rooms (#spacewalk, #spacewalk-devel) are not just filled with Red Hat developers but rather users and other developers as well. We even have non-Red Hat contributors already.
• The team hasn’t imploded in the process. I wasn’t around for the majority of the initial work to release it as open, but I have watched the team migrate to an open model. It’s not as easy as just telling everyone one day to start talking in Freenode instead of the internal IRC server. There were also a number of decisions to make regarding how to manage the relationship between Spacewalk and Satellite that could have been a lot uglier if the team wasn’t so solid.
• There was a ton of activity and interest at the Spacewalk Campground at Red Hat Summit last year.

Check out more at Spacewalk wiki or come find us on Freenode at #spacewalk-devel.