A Bear Flag Revolt Brews and “Grizzly” Wins As The Name For The Next OpenStack Release

Oh yeah – the bear is in the house.  The Bear revolt won. OpenStack’s next release will go by the name “Grizzly.”

I love this story. OpenStack is the open cloud effort for organizations to build their own clouds. The fast growing organization has since its start had a policy for naming protocols. It stated that the name had to be for a county or municipality where the OpenStack Summit would take place. The nane could only be eight characters. Releases have been done in alphabetic order as follows:

But some in the OpenStack community had other thoughts.  A subversive movement emerged to amend the rules. The community revolt spread and so Thierry Carrez, the release manager for OpenStack called for a vote:

Is Grizzly better than anything else?

 We should no longer limit ourselves to cities and counties near the next Design Summit ! Grizzly sounds so great that we should extend the rules to include either first names of a combined city name (“Grizzly Flats” being a city in California), or official symbols of the territory in question (the Grizzly bear being depicted on the California state flag).

Should we stand by our (arbitrary) rules and go with the result of https://launchpad.net/~openstack/+poll/g-release-naming or just go with “Grizzly” ?

Of course, Grizzly won.

And so OpenStack did two polls.

The regular poll selected “Gazelle.” It had 35 votes. Gilroy came in second with 27 votes.

But the revolt poll had different results. It showed overwhelming support for the “Grizzly” name with 88 votess. Instead of going with the regular poll, Grizzly was named victor.

And so now, OpenStack has a new naming method. It’s called The Waldorf exception that accepts elements of the state or country flag in addition to city or county names.

Bring out the Grizzly, baby!