>> 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.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
We're here live in L.A. for the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America.
I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman, my co-host.
Our next guest Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, runs the whole show.
Welcome back to The Cube, great to see you.
>> Thank you, thank you.
Runs the whole show is a little bit of an overstatement.
>> Well, certainly great keynote up there, I mean, a lot of things coming together.
Just some structural things.
Let's get the update on what's going on structurally with the Linux Foundation, one, and then two,
the keynote today, this morning, really kind of laid out the state of the union, if you
will, and all cylinders are pumping, no doubt, on open source.
So give the quick update on kind of what's going on with the Linux Foundation and then
let's get in some of the trends inside the open source movement.
>> Yeah, I mean, our organization has grown quite a bit in the last few years as evident
by all the people who are here at this event.
But our focus is really on the projects that are important to, you know, the stability,
security, and growth of the global internet and of large-scale systems.
And when you look at Linux or Node.js or things like our networking projects which are powering
the production networks for 3 1/2 billion people, what we're really focused on is making
sure those projects are healthy, making sure that they have great developers who write
incredible code, that it's used to power things like China Mobile's network or AT&T's production
network.
And then, those firms are employing the developers who then write more code, you get more solutions,
products, services based on Linux or whatever.
More reinvestment, lather, rinse, repeat.
It's that cycle we're trying to promote.
>> So before we get into some of the stats, structurally, I know this show, we've Cube
comments out there, clarify the structure.
How the shows are rolling out, how are you guys putting together the big-tent events,
and how developers can get involved in the specific events across, but now there's a
ton of projects.
But just at a high level, what's the structure?
>> Yeah, so, you know, and I'll throw out a few stats.
We have about 25,000 developers that attend all of our events which are all over the world.
But we have our Open Source Summit which is really sort of a summit to come together and
talk about these big-picture issues around sustainability to allow for cross-project
collaboration.
We have project-specific events so the CloudNativeCon, KubeCon event which is coming up in Austin
which is going to be blow-out, you know, I'm expecting thousands of people.
I think probably three, 4,000 people.
>> And even more platinum sponsors than I've ever seen on any project before so huge demand.
>> It's crazy, yeah.
Yeah, you know, get it while it's good, right?
All these things kind of go up and down but they're on the upswing.
So we have project-specific and then in the networking sector, we have have the Open Networking
Summit which is sort of similar to the Open Source Summit but much more focused on networking
technology, SDN, and NFD, and that is going to be in L.A. next year and we'll have a U.S.
event and then a European and an Asian.
>> And this show's purpose is what?
How would you position the Open Source Summit?
>> The Open Source Summit is where all the projects come together and do cross-pollination.
I mean, the idea here is that if you're just always in your silo, you can't actually appreciate
what someone else is doing that may improve your project.
>> And Jim, there's a couple of events that came together to make this 'cause it was LinuxCon,
ContainerCon, and MesosCon is also co-resident so.
>> Exactly, so we just decided after a while that all these events could come together
and again, this cross-pollination of ideas.
>> And they kind of did, they're just different hotels in Seattle last time.
>> Yeah, exactly.
That's enough, it's just going to be Open Source--
>> It's a big-tent event.
>> It's a big-tent event and it really reflects how open source has gone mainstream in a way
that I don't think any of us would've predicted even maybe five, six years ago.
>> It's pretty massive.
Just to quote some stats.
23 million plus open source developers, what you shared onstage there, want to get to your
keynote. 41 billion lines of code.
1,000 plus new projects a day.
10,000 new versions pushed per day.
64 million repos on GitHub.
Just amazing growth so this kind of points to obviously the rising tide is floating all
boats.
I made a comment, I tweeted, in the spirit of the joke of standing on the shoulders of
giants before you, it's like, what shoulders are we standing on now?
Because there's so many projects.
Is there going to be like a legacy like the dual-star, badge values, been around for a
while?
You mentioned old news and you bring up Linus onstage.
I mean, some projects are older, more mature, Bruce Wayne, Tier One, meat and potatoes,
some got a little bit more flair and fashion to it, if you will.
So you got new dynamics going on.
Share your thoughts on this.
>> Yeah, I mean, it's like the shoulders you're standing on are almost like stage-diving,
right?
Where it's just lots of people's shoulders that you're really bouncing around on.
But the idea here, and what we really focus on, is what are the most important projects
in the world and how do we make sure we sustain those projects.
So those are the ones that you're going to generally see focused on here.
Like, you know, if you've got two people contributing to one small repo for a very small project,
that's probably not something that's going to be super high-profile here.
But what we're trying to do is bring together sort of the big projects and also the key
contributors.
You know, if you look at the distribution of contribution, and this is the thing, I
think, if you're a developer listening to something like this, someone who gives just
one commit to a project to solve some kind of problem they might have, that's the vast
majority of people.
Somebody who does maybe five to 10 commits, you know, a little bit less, quite a bit less.
The vast majority of code, people who give 25 or more commits to a project, small group
of folks, they're here.
>> I know Stu wants to ask a question, one final question on the growth 'cause this kind
of reminds me of sports as we're like the ESPN of tech here for the community.
If you look at the growth, you put a slide in there by SourceClear that show the projection,
by 2026, at 400 million libraries, putting it today around, I think, 64 million.
This is going to be like an owners meeting.
It's kind of like they get together, this event because you are going to have so many
projects 'cause this is kind of the vibe you got going on in here.
The scale is massive, this is going to be almost like the owners meeting, the teams.
Expansion's going to be coming, you have to deal with that, that's challenging.
>> We're ready to grow, I mean, we've been working on systems and staffing and processes
to help scale with that.
You know, we take seriously that that code runs modern society.
It keeps us private or doesn't as we saw with the Equifax hack which was a CVE in an open
source project and we want to be ready to up our game.
Let's say we could have secure coding class at this very event for the greatest developers
who are working on our most important projects in the world.
Would that make all of our lives better?
Yes, absolutely.
>> Yes, absolutely would.
Yeah and you want to enable that, that's where you're going.
>> That's exactly where we're going.
>> Jim, the quote that jumped out at me that you gave in the keynote was, projects with
sustainable ecosystems are the ones that matter.
How do we balance all this?
I heard in, you know, Linus's Q and A it was, look, individual's important but companies
are important.
You put up a slide and said, there's thousands and thousands of projects, sometimes we're
going to get some really awesome stuff from three people contributing code versus the
massive ecosystem with all the platinum providers so, it's always in technology, it's an and
and it's very nuanced but how do we get our arms around this?
How do we know where to focus?
>> It's worth going back in time to understand where the future is going and study innovation
theory, you know, Eric von Hippel at MIT, or Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School.
And you look at the framework, which is, you have corporations who underwrite a lot of
development by hiring developers who have an equal importance in this and then users
of that software.
So those are your main constituents and sometimes they're the same people, right, or the same
things.
They're not mutually exclusive, they're actually self-reinforcing if you get the formula right
and you make sure that the project is in good shape so that it gives confidence to industry
or society that, hey, we can count on that.
I think Heartbleed and OpenSSL maybe rattled people's cages like, hey, can we count on,
not just this project, but can we count on open source period?
So we spent a ton of time working with that project to provide them millions in resources,
audited their code, expanded their testing, and we learned a hell of a lot about how to
support these communities in the most important developer projects in the world and create
that positive feedback loop, that's what we're doing.
>> Yeah and Jim, it's, as an analyst, one of the things we're always asked is, right,
how do I choose the right technology?
Whereas companies now are contributing here so it's not just I'm putting dollars in, I'm
putting manpower into this.
And the foundations sometimes get a lot of lung from people, saying it's like, oh well,
people throw money and what do they get out of it?
I liked what I heard today, you talking about this cycle, and maybe talk to our audience
a little bit about CHAOSS which I though was a nice, tongue-in-cheek acronym to say how
you're actually going to bring order to the chaos that we see in the open source world.
>> I'm going to come to this but I want to answer one quick question about the roles
of organizations like ours.
We are the roadies, the supporting cast, and the plumbers and the janitors of the system
that keep things going but the real rock stars are the developers.
If you think about it, Linux is worth $10 billion.
An average kernel developer makes probably, let's say $150,000 a year, by the way, they
make more than your average developer because they're in such high demand.
The role of organizations like ours is such a tiny fraction financially of what is really
fueling this model but it's an important one.
What we ask ourselves all the time is, why do you need us?
Who cares, right?
Like, throw your code up on GitHub, you don't need the Linux Foundation, right?
Why do we even exist?
And the answer is to do things like this Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software,
to provide the infrastructure for sustainability.
Sustainability is something that we need to measure, right?
How many developers are contributing to a project?
Are they from a diverse community so that if one group goes away, there'll be somebody
else there to do that work?
How much test coverage do they have?
Are there code quality metrics that we could look at?
Do they have security practices like a responsible disclosure policy, a security mailing list?
Have they recently fuzzed their code?
Are they a community that's welcoming for people of different backgrounds?
And so on and so forth.
If you don't have a healthy project, you kind of don't want to bet your company on this
project by using it in a production system, right?
But here's the interesting thing, how many people are using that code in production also
is a metric for health, right?
Because that's where the reinvestment is going to come in the form of developers who are
working on it.
>> There's a difference between being proactive and jamming something down someone's throat.
So you're taking an approach, if I get this right, to be kind of the same open source
ethos, use some KPIs, key performance indicators, to give them a sense of success.
But it's not an edict saying--
>> No, no, it can't be an edict.
What you want to do is preserve the organic innovation that goes on in open source and
get projects to go, and you'll notice that curve of sort of value to volume goes up and
to the left, we could've written it to the right but, you know, the whole copyleft thing
we love.
How do you get that organic innovation to kind of go from this small project up and
to the left?
How do you capture that?
Well, give tools to everyone so that they can better self-analyze.
>> John: You get exponential growth with that.
>> Exactly.
>> If you try to control, it's linear but you bring it to the community, you get exponential
growth.
>> Exactly, so we studied a ton of innovation theory, we looked at how we could build frameworks
to facilitate this kind of form of mass innovation and so that's where tools like CHAOSS which
is being worked on by Red Hat and a lot of companies who want to figure out which project
should I work on?
How can I spot that one earlier?
And we're excited about it.
>> You know, I always joke, being the old guy that I am, in the late '80s, early '90s,
'80s particularly when I was coding.
We did everything, we wrote all the code.
You bring up an interesting stat and you put the finger on, at least for me, and I think
this is where a lot of us old timers who had to do all the libraries from scratch.
You mentioned the code sandwich, the code club, the club sandwich, how code's being
made and the interesting thing, as you point out, 90% of most great software is done with
open source where the 10% innovation is done with original code or original content, if
you will, and that that is the norm.
So open source is now called the code sandwich because you can put your differentiation and
that's a good use of time.
>> That's the meat, right.
>> That's the meat, it's not a wish sandwich to use the old Blues Brothers example but
I mean look, the thing is is that that's dynamic is real, the code is leverageable, and that
this is the dynamic so where'd the number come from?
Because that seems really high to me but I love it.
>> So that number came from a combination of Sonatype, SourceClear, and other organizations
that monitor commercial reuse of software on a global basis.
So these are the folks who are actually working with commercial industry to look at the makeup
of their code, basically.
You don't have to go far to look at a Node.js developer, they're using Node.js, they're
taking packages out of NPM, and they're writing, they're cut and paste masters, but they write
this critical component that's the meat of their application, it's what they do.
>> But that's the innovation fabric that's happening.
>> It also is a requirement because let's look at a modern, luxury vehicle today.
It has 100 million lines of code in it.
That's more than an F-35, like, fighter jet.
That's an unbelievable amount of code.
Toyota, who we work with, and you know, our AGL, our Automotive Grade Linux, is in their
Camry.
They couldn't write that code on their own.
It's just too much.
And this is how we get to autonomous vehicle control and things like that.
>> I know you got a tight schedule, I want to make one more comment, get your reaction
to it.
I made a tweet and said, it's open bar in open source and with a reference to all the
goodness being donated by companies, Google TensorFlow, there's a lot of other things
coming in, these libraries.
A lot of people are bringing really, really big IP to the table, IoT, and I kind of made
an open remark 'cause a lot of the young kids, they think this is normal, like, well it's
going to get better.
Keep on drinking that open source.
Is this normal?
Is it going to be more like this in the future?
Because you have essentially real intellectual property, like say from Google, being given
to the open source communities as a gift for innovation.
I mean, that is just unprecedented greatness.
>> The reason for that is they're not doing it necessarily altruistically although I think
you can take it that way, they're doing it in a way that betters themselves and others
at the same time.
I mean, it is a form of collective capitalism where they've realized, my value's over here,
it is better for me to collaborate on underlying infrastructure software that my customers
don't care about that's not critical to my system but I absolutely have to have and I'm
going to focus on data or I'm going to focus on much higher-level innovation.
And what that's doing is creating this hockey stick of innovation where, as we share more
and more and more infrastructure software, and as that keeps moving up and up the stack,
we all benefit.
>> So in the theory of the management, bring up management theory, their theory, I'd love
to get your thoughts on, is that they're betting on scale rather than trying to go for profits
in the short-term, they'd much rather share intellectual property on the back-end value
of scale and scale's the new competitive advantage.
>> Exactly, take Kubernetes as an example.
The fact that, today, and just even a couple years ago this wasn't known, we didn't quite
know where this was going to be, but today you can take Node.js, build a container, you
know, take an application, throw it into a container, and use Kubernetes to run it on
Azure, Amazon, Google, or in a private cloud.
That definition, the ability to do that, unlocks this massive developer productivity which
creates more value which is more business opportunity for all these guys.
You know, they're not doing it 'cause they're nice people, they're doing it 'cause they're
unlocking market potential.
>> And they're the real rock stars.
Jim you're doing a great job.
Congratulations on your success.
You got a lot of growth in front of you, a lot of challenges and opportunities certainly
with that and of course, the tech athletes out there doing the coding, they're the real
rock stars, they're the real athletes.
Of course, we get more on The Cube, thanks for your support with The Cube as well, appreciate
that.
>> Jim: Thank you, thanks for everything.
>> Alright, this is live coverage from Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles,
California.
I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.