>> Announcer: Live, from Los Angeles, it's The Cube
covering Open Source Summit North America 2017.
Brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat.
>> Welcome back everyone, here live in LA
for the Open Source Summit in North America.
I'm John Furrier with my cohosts Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman
who will be back shortly, he's out scouring the hallways
for all the news and analysis, getting all the scuttlebutt.
We're here with our next guest, Brian Behlendorf,
who's the executive director of the Hyperledger project,
part of the Linux Foundation.
Thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure.
>> Thanks for sharing.
We were just talking before the camera started rolling
about block chain and the coolness around,
the hype around it,
but again the hype cycle is usually
a pretext to the trend.
Hyperledger is one of those exciting projects
that like AI, everyone is jazzed about
because it's the future, right. (laughs)
Open source is getting bigger and bigger
as Jim Zemlin was saying,
23 million developers and growing
but there's still so much work to be done.
The global society's relying on open source.
It's shaping our culture.
Hyperledger's one of those things where it is going
to actually disrupt the culture and change it potentially.
And even this morning, Chinese banned virtual currencies
and ICOs and all based upon block chains.
>> Time to invest, right? >> Yeah.
Always invest in whatever China bans,
it'll always be successful.
So your thoughts, first before we start,
let's get into Hyperledger project.
It's certainly super exciting project,
people are talking about it heavily,
what's going on with the project?
Give a quick update, what's the purpose,
who's involved, and what are some of the milestones
you guys have achieved?
>> Well Hyperledger is less than two years old,
it was launched officially in December of 2015.
I joined in May.
It was founded on the principle that
hey, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening
in the cryptocurrency world,
but there might be some more prosaic,
some more directly applicable applications
of distributed ledger and smart contract technology
to rebooting a lot of otherwise very thorny problems
for industries in the world.
The main problem being you've got companies doing business
with each other, and they're recording transactions
and they'll have to go back and reconcile their systems
to get audited books, right.
A lot of the systems out there depend upon processes
that are very human processes
that are prone to error, prone to corruption.
So the idea is the more that you can pull together
information about transactions
and do a shared system of record,
which is really what the distributed ledger is,
and then the more about if the governance
and the business processes enclosed
that you can automate by smart contract,
the more effective and the more efficient
a lot of these markets will be.
So that's what Hyperledger is about.
>> So certainly, the keynote was all about open sources
being dependent upon,
and Jim Zemlin as well as Christine Corbett said,
in true labor distributed control,
we all know that open source,
but I love the point about changing the face of capitalism,
because Hyperledger is a term that you can almost apply
to the notion of decentralized,
not just distributed, but decentralized business.
So the notion of supply chain, things in finance,
to moving goods around the world,
this is interesting.
Talk about the impact of how you guys are seeing
some of these applications where now
a decentralized architecture combined with distributed
creates an opportunity for changing the face of capitalism.
>> Let me, 'cause the word distributed can be very loaded,
right, you know, and even decentralized,
it can be very loaded.
What I've tried to popularize is the idea
of minimum viable centralization.
Football games and other sports games have referees.
When we play a game like this,
well sometimes we don't need a referee,
it's just us playing pick up basketball,
but sometimes we want somebody on the periphery
we all agree to, who helps remind us what the rules are,
and throws a red flag from time to time.
So you see in industries ranging from finance,
where you're building these transaction networks,
to supply chains where you need to track the flow of food
and to know when, if food has gotten spoiled,
possibly where that came from,
or diamonds that have been involved in conflict diamond,
or other illegal activities.
You want to know where that came from
and it involves that industry getting together and saying
we all agree we have a big net interest in making
our business actually follow certain rules and norms.
Using a distributed ledger to bring that about
is something that can just provide
a lot of optimizations out there.
>> So most people think of Bitcoin and Ethereum
with all this ICO buzz as the front-end
to really the underlying block chain,
which you were talking about. >> Yeah.
>> And that's kind of like, I get that FEA currency,
this market development, tulip craze,
bubble some people call it, whatever,
but you're getting at something unique
and this is that there's a real business value
of Hyperledger...
I won't say boring, but it's like meat and potatoes stuff.
It's like really kind of- >> Prosaic is the word.
>> Prosaic, it's like, but it's disruptive.
So if you think about the old days when we were growing up,
or I was growing up,
ERP was on mini computers,
enterprise resource planning,
customer relationship management software,
those were bloated, monolithic software packages.
>> Yeah. >> Still out there today.
They handle the so-called supply chain.
So is the Hyperledger a disruption to that,
is it an augmentation of that?
>> So to try to put it in context,
the cost of sending a shipping container
from China to the United States.
Half of that is in paperwork.
Half of that is because that container on average
will go through 30 different organizations,
from the supplier that you're assembling the goods into
to all the different ports,
all the different regulatory authorities,
out finally to where it's delivered.
If you can optimize those business processes,
if you can make it so that those happen in a space
where it's not about paper and facts,
which a lot of that world is still ruled by today,
or a bureaucrat sitting there reviewing stuff
that's coming in and having to stamp it
when really all that could be automated,
you could cut the cost of that
and take the shipping industry from what is right now
a money-losing industry to potentially
being viable once again.
>> So optimization's really critical to them.
>> It's optimization,
but there's also some new capabilities here.
I spent a year at the Department of Health
and Human Services trying to help make healthcare records
more portable for patients.
We wrote and got the industry to write
a ton of open source software,
implemented open standards to make these records sharable,
but the problem was the patient wasn't involved.
This was about trying to take two orgs,
something that all of their bean counters
told them not to do, which was share patient records,
because no, that's proprietary value.
>> John: And the HIPAA regulates, all that nonsense.
>> Exactly.
>> John: So backend processes basically.
>> With block chain technology, though,
we can reinvent that as a patient-driven process.
We could reinvent a lot of the other business processes
out there that involve personally identifiable information
like the Equifax disaster.
We could reinvent how the credit markets assess risk
in individuals through block chain technology
in a way that doesn't require us to build
these big, central, anonymous, third parties
that Hoover everybody's data
and become these massive privacy Titanics.
We can reinvent a lot of this through block chain tech,
and that's a lot of what we're working on at Hyperledger.
>> So I was going to say, and the Linux Foundation's
in kind of a unique place 'cause you're used to driving
these big, open source projects.
There's a lot of people that are trying to build
the wrapper around the base core of block chain
to come up with their version,
or their kind of application if you will,
whether it be Bitcoin or whatever,
but you guys are in kind of a special place
based on your roots.
>> We believe that, I mean, open standards are nice,
but what really matters is common code.
In a world like we envision, where rather than saying
you've got one big network like Bitcoin
or one big network like Ethereum,
you've got thousands or tens of thousands of these
permission networks that cover different industries,
different geographies, different regions.
What you need is common software
so that when a developer goes to work on an application
that touches one or multiple of these,
they've got familiar idioms to work with.
They've got familiar technologies to work with,
like Go or Java or JavaScript, right,
that they've got a community of other technologists
who've been trained up on these technologies
that can help them bootstrap and launch their project
and maybe even become a contributor
to the open source project.
So what we've figured out at the Linux Foundation
is how to make that virtuous cycle go,
where companies benefit commercially from it
and then feed back into the project,
and that's what we're doing here.
>> You mentioned the word, you almost rethink
and reimagine some of these things
like the Equifax disaster.
I think it's pretty of a no brainer,
I think most tech people are really seeing this as viable,
like absolutely it's going to happen.
There's a nice trajectory vision that people are buying into
because it's almost you can see it hanging together,
playing out technically.
What are some of the things going on in the project
can you share with the folks watching
about some of the things that you're doing
to get there faster, what's going on with the community,
what's some of the issues, what are the concerns,
how do people get involved?
Just take some time to a little bit deeper
into the project.
>> So we're not an R&D kind of free-thinking kind of thing,
we're about writing code and shipping it
and getting it to production.
Hyperledger Fabric just hit a 1.0,
that was a signal from the developers
that this code is ready to be run in production systems
and for you to track digital assets with.
By far does not mean it's the end of the road.
It's the end of chapter one,
but at least it's a place where the kind of clear intent is
let's make this actually usable by enterprises.
The other projects, we've got eight different projects total
at Hyperledger, some of them even compete with each other,
but we're driving all of them to get to a 1.0,
and over time, all of them to talk about
how they relate to each other in complementary ways.
>> What are some of the profile developers you're getting,
because some people always ask,
should I get involved, what can I sink my teeth into,
what are some of the meaty kind of things
that people are doing with it,
who's the persona that are coming in,
these enterprise developers, they more traditional
full-stack developers, can you give a range
of some of the persona or attributes?
>> Because this is early code still,
I mean this whole space is still pretty early
when it comes to understanding how to use these technologies
especially at scale, at a devops scale.
A lot of the people first coming into the tech community now
are fairly advanced, are kind of the whiz kids,
but we're seeing that gradually broaden out.
We're now at a point where we could use developers
coming in and writing sample applications.
We could use people helping us with documentation.
We're developing training materials
that'll be Creative Commons licensed,
so everybody'll be able to deliver those,
and as they find bugs or add features to the training,
they can do that too.
So we could really use anybody at this point.
>> So folks watching, get involved.
Any white spaces you might want to tease 'em out with
that you see happening?
Obviously you mentioned tracking digital assets,
data is assets, that's cool.
Anything that's going on with data
probably is a digital asset, you'd agree.
What's some of the things
that people could get motivated on,
can you share any insight that you might have
that would motivate someone to jump in?
>> I think any industry has these challenges
of weaving their systems together with other businesses,
and trying to do that in a way
that holds each other to account.
This is a system for building systems of record
between organizations.
You running a database, me running a database,
we don't get there on our own,
we only get there by working with consortia,
by working as a community to actually build these systems
and so I'd say every business has that challenge,
whether their engineers have felt free
to go in and try to tackle that or not.
>> Imagine the old extranet days,
when you used to meet people building
some of these networks.
Similar concept where block chain is one big-
>> Happy family. >> Collaborative network.
Okay final question for you,
kind of shooting forward a little bit,
what do you expect to happen with the community,
any thoughts on some of the goals you have
as executive director?
Obviously you have some hackathons for good,
we're seeing block chain being applied
to some real things with 1.0.
What do you see rolling out moving forward,
which are some of your goals?
>> Massively grow the developer community,
both the one end of the spectrum,
which is the whiz kids, the hardcore developers,
to move forward on kind of the leading edge of that,
but really we've got to bring 100,000 developers
in this space over the next couple years
just to meet the demand that's there in the industry
for that talent.
>> So if now an executive, I said hey,
I saw this great Cube interview with Brian,
it's awesome, go get involved.
How does someone get involved?
It's just standard community model, it's just jump in,
what advice would you give someone
if they want to engage and participate?
>> For every one of our projects, if you gave it an hour,
you'd get to a running instance of that software.
Fabric or Sawtooth, within an hour,
you should have a running four node instance
that you can start writing chain code to,
which is the smart contract language.
From there, getting involved in the community
is a matter of joining mailing lists,
joining our Rocket.Chat channels.
Rocket.Chat's an alternative to Slack
that we actually prefer.
And I think you'll find a really welcoming community
of other devs who want to tell you
about what the projects are,
want to help you kind of climb that learning curve.
>> One of the comments, and I'll end on a good note here,
is that Christine gave in the keynote,
she says code can shape culture.
You've been in the industry a long time,
you've seen the wave, you've been on the shoulders of others
and now as open source goes to the next level,
how is code going to shape the culture in your opinion?
How should people start working together
to take that, I would say almost not a moon shot,
but it's really more of an imperative,
that culture will be changed,
inclusion is obviously huge.
Your thoughts on code shaping culture.
>> We've had a decline in the trust in institutions,
in the United States and worldwide,
not just in the last seven months since November,
but actually for the last 20 years.
Edelman does this survey every year
where they ask you your trust in brands,
your trust in government,
your trust in the process, the fairness of society,
and for 20 years that's been on a straight line decline,
to the point where we ask ourselves,
can you trust any level of government?
Can you trust businesses to look out for your interest?
The answer almost generically is going to be no.
This is a technology that can save us that.
This is a technology that I believe can help us
define the rules of the game, help us build society,
but then actually automate and implement that
in a way that doesn't require us
to have to bribe an official
or curry favor with a school official to get our kid
into that school or anything like that.
This is a way to try, I think, to make the world
more accountable and more fair.
>> And open source has that inclusive,
and staying away from the gerrymandering.
I love the quote,
it's so confusing now, it's like, who do you ask,
where's the source of truth,
and it used to be RTFM and check the source code.
Now it's there is no manual, who is the source,
fake news, all these bots, it's kind of crazy.
So this is a call to arms, open source.
>> I think it is, I think it really is.
>> Jeff: Trust as a service.
>> Okay Brian, thanks so much for coming on The Cube.
Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me.
>> Executive director for the Hyperledger project,
super important project, really a game-changer,
changing the face of capitalism
and also continuing the trend in accelerating open source.
I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick.
More live coverage from The Cube after this short break.
(electronic music)