search

opencontainers / oci-conformance

OCI Conformance/Certification Working Group
https://conformance.opencontainers.org
Apache License 2.0
72 stars 43 forks source link

Membership Requirement for Certification? #5

Closed caniszczyk closed 2 years ago

caniszczyk commented 7 years ago

There's some mixed views on whether an OCI membership should be required for certification or not. We should have a discussion to come up with a final decision here, there are pros and cons, but I generally like to require membership with certification as it's a membership benefit and helps sustain the project over the long term.

RobDolinMS commented 7 years ago

I think this will depend on how much "cost" there is to operating the certification program.

If image certification (validation?) can be done with minimal overhead, we could offer it to anyone.

If runtime certification is somewhat time-intensive (create a VM, install the runtime and dependencies, run test tools, ...) I can definitely understand not wanting to offer this for free.

RobDolinMS commented 7 years ago

From the testing that @stephenrwalli and I did, it seems like runtime testing (when the applicant provides step-by-step instructions) is relatively lightweight.

Toward that end, I'm inclined to suggest we make both the image certification / validation and runtime certification free and open to any product / organization.

Thoughts from others? /cc @caniszczyk @jtborek @stephenrwalli

caniszczyk commented 7 years ago

@RobDolinMS

Here's the the thing, the more I think about it, I want to require membership AT LEAST for the runtime specification because it helps fund the organization (protect the marks, staff etc) and don't want to be put in a situation where people certify and then don't renew their membership because they don't have a specific need. I want to make sure the OCI is sustainable in the long run and this is one way it helps.

wking commented 7 years ago

On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 02:30:31PM -0700, Chris Aniszczyk wrote:

…I want to require membership AT LEAST for the runtime specification because it helps fund the organization (protect the marks, staff etc) and don't want to be put in a situation where people certify and then don't renew their membership because they don't have a specific need…

To paraphrase, it sounds like you're saying that the cost of the certification program is mostly in maintaining the certifications, and not in the initial generation. So folks would be buying the initial certification test (cheap), mark protection (expensive?), and …?

I don't see all that much need to link that to Membership (which in the charter is more tied to the trademark board and votes for the 5-member TOB cohort [1]). Since there is a benefit to having more certified implementations (it makes it clear that there is less vendor lock-in by adopting the OCI), it may make sense to decouple the governance and certification fees.

[1]: https://www.opencontainers.org/about/governance §3.b, §4, and §6.g

stephenrwalli commented 7 years ago

I believe certification is a product thing. A project can claim to conform to the spec. It can run the suite that is available. It can post its results wherever it chooses so to do. All that is free. But a product wants to use the marks as a signal to the marketplace. I see no problem with making membership a condition of using the marks and posting results in the central location.

jdolitsky commented 2 years ago

Going to close as outdated. Please re-open if more discussion necessary.