Distribution - Prevent users being locked-in

[jpkrohling]

Given that I'm OTel
When my users see vendor-specific projects being called "a Distribution of OpenTelemetry"
Then I want my users to know that they are not being locked in

Or, written differently: We (OTel) don't want users to adopt Collector distributions and end up in a lock-in situation: if we allow something to be named a Collector distribution, it should be used only for things that don't lock in our users.

Things we figured out:

None yet.

Next thing to figuring out:

• Is this a real problem? (see first comment)

What to figure out next:

• Is this a problem we want to solve?

[jpkrohling]

Is this a real problem? At this stage, it would be helpful for the community (contributors, users) to help us understand how this affects them. If you believe this is a problem, or has been affected by this, vote this comment with 👍🏽 . If you think this is NOT a problem, vote this comment with 👎🏽

[jpkrohling]

@atoulme, this is the issue you mentioned today during the SIG call. Can you help me improve the problem statement?

[yurishkuro]

I don't think "being locked in" is such a binary condition. This needs more granularity.

• "bad lock-in" - having to redeploy all your applications because they were talking to collector in proprietary format
• not a bad lock-in - having vendor-specific configuration for the collector that does not work with another distro.

From what I am seeing so far (in this and other issues/problems) is that you either use the official collector (core or contrib) and get the "guarantees" (which are actually useless because your only option is to use the same thing), or you use some something else ("compatible" distro, vendor product) and you get zero guarantees from OTEL project. I didn't see a proposal where other gradations of this are sustainable.