Everyone in the OpenStack community has a vested interested in making it work. Without a strong guiding hand, the open source community runs the risk of becoming so fragmented that compatibility and integration suffer.
This is a bigger challenge than most people realize because the line between opens source «customer» and «developer» is very thin. As Gigaom’s Paul Miller points out in his latest research report, local configuration changes and code alterations have a way of moving the enterprise installation away from the community release, and the problem is compounded with each new release of the platform. Over time, the initial cost-savings of turning to an open source solution can be eaten up by complex patching and maintenance requirements and the user becomes further isolated from an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.