 Hi everyone, I'm Gordon Hap with Red Hat and this is definitely the meta entry on the software packaging discussion this afternoon I will mention that I'm moving through things quickly a day But this is actually based in a book that I wrote let co-wrote with the one my colleagues last summer I have some cards with pointers to the free e-book and if anybody on the stream or anyone else Would like to kind of point their search engine at Gordon Hap look for bitmason. There's free download link in the site So when we started out when computers in fact with things in general We really didn't have packaging we in this case the old IBM accounting machine You had to wire things up individually and in fact this sort of thing lasted for a long time We were sewing rope core memory in the Apollo 11 11 guidance computer So basically every piece of hardware you needed to program individually Now over time in outside of a little bit before computers We created packaging when you initially with probably leaves and straw and things like that the earliest Packaging with pots was about 20,000 years ago So in China the earliest pots discovered so long before what we would call civilization And of course over time we came up with forms of packaging in the computer industry as well And you know these are some of the most common ones by I'm guessing there have been something like hundreds maybe even thousands of formats of Magnetic tape another type of removable media over the years and one of the things that this brought us in the distance The fact that we could replicate software and move it from place to place Was that allowed things like the ISV industry to be created? One great piece of trivia that I have to share that I ran across and researching my book for this is That you can argue the first ISV was syncom in about 1968 That company is still running with one of his founders as the CEO, which I thought was both neat and kind of cool So ISV so so this is getting to another use of packaging we do you think about packaging as a way to Have transactions to start to standardize things a bit you know a lot of those early pots and and And Baskets and so forth really weren't very standardized But you get to about the time of the Romans or so and they even had a standard emphora That's what these pots are up in one of the temples and that was the standard measurement And it was some number of leaders I think this is actually the wrong number, but it was a standard measurement and Of course just being Belgium You know, I have to introduce beer kegs as yet an other type of example of this But obviously just about any field you can imagine has his own Variant of this whether it's barrels whether it's steel drums whether it's just a thing you have this set of highly standardized But the software isn't the only ones who aren't good at standardizing And of course, you know beer kegs are useful for other things after you've drunk the beer now Moving kind of this is all sort of almost Utilitarian use of packaging and if you take sort of the next step forward Products any kind of product it consists of multiple components multiple parts is really a form of packaging You know, you don't you have options But you don't pick and choose the nuts and bolts that go into a car and Henry Ford You know serve popularized drove the assembly line and automobiles I serve like this slide Ikea buys GM probably a little unfair with the founder of Ikea passing away over the last week and in fact Ikea is really very much of course a product itself. It's just a product. It's not assembled product But it's a product that is brought together to deliver certain characteristics to consumers Predominantly price and easy ease of transport and of course the trade-off is there often is in packaging is You optimize for certain things in the case of Ikea you're optimizing for price You're optimizing for being able to take the thing home in your car You're not optimizing for the ease of getting things set up at the other end necessarily and The other aspect of packaging and really products in general Most of you have probably heard of the mythical man month by Fred Brooks Who would popularize term the mythical man month? This is the idea that? adding more Engineers more developers to a late project Makes it even later because you need to bring the people up to speed There's communication overhead and so forth But he actually opens up this book with a different idea that if you look at going from a program And in an open source context you might actually be able to think of this as an open source project to a complete Product it goes along two different axes and you'll more effort on each of those axes and from at least the perspective of the IBM system 360 That was by 9x effort You know and of course software Products bring a lot of things together as well if you're here earlier Langdon talked about distributions Distributions are one form of that so are all these other things that commercial software companies like such as myself do your product testing documentation Support all that other kind of thing that turns something like an open source project Into something that typical enterprises are going to use Products also bring together all these other pieces in the in the retail industry including a certain amount of verification You know this has the FDA label, which is I'm not quite sure what the equivalent in the EU is But it's basically you know, these are the contents here. These are what nutritional information is Along with some instructions and how use it and so forth You know, but there's of course Just because you write something on a label doesn't make it true These are some early patent mess and labels which took us a little while to outlaws false advertising The other thing you see is how this sort of Informational aspect has evolved over time because if you look at early general stores, this was largely a self-service operation You went to the clerk they pick things out for you. Hey, what's in here? They tell you and it wasn't really a self certain stores weren't really self-service So you didn't need to a law of labeling, but in the United States as we got grocery store consolidation And so forth stores get large or self-service. You can see the contrast here where suddenly there's a lot more information available Provided by the package so that you can use it directly as a user and You know condensed milk Corn flakes Hills Brothers coffee really lousy Budweiser beer You know all these are all things that you know labels and packaging developed over time and in fact You know you live in a Coca Cola bottle and if you're a kind of marketing person who deals with these things There's all kinds of cues and things about that bottle. They're part of the experience and With software as well a lot of the experience is outside of strictly speaking the narrow product So you have things like books and blogs and you know probably could even throw meet-ups in there Conferences what have you is all part of creating a product experience? the one most interesting recent developments here is an increased effort in Making the software itself self-documenting and you know either within the product itself or you know things like ansible playbooks For example or effectively a way to make a product Document itself install itself check dependencies that kind of thing We go beyond the product and this is kind of sort of bring this home There's also this idea of bundling where the product doesn't stand alone along with its dependencies and one of the aspects of Bundling which I think it actually sort of famous and noble in this era is the newspaper Bundled a newspaper a print a historical printed newspaper Was well to some degree is still in effect the bundle had the investigative journalism It had the classified ads It had the sport score You could use it the lying bird cages when you were done with it and so forth They had a local monopoly which is what sort of allowed this and then what happened to things like Craigslist came in go We'll take the classified ads and not even make money off of them because we don't care and Various other pieces started being carved off as well the routine facts are no longer something that a newspaper can sell and That was but in that bundle kind of started breaking down You know by contrast here's another bundle That is being has been kept together very very much I mean almost famously so is Apple in terms of creating this bundled experience and they have been able to keep it together because they control that hardware and people want that hardware and Really this I think kind of what the challenge here I mean everybody in this room is familiar with you know And you probably have different views on the sort of the Apple bundle You know is that a good thing or is that a bad thing and you know, there's certainly one Very valid point that you know these welded chassis are not really great things and there's the other side But it's a great user experience and again individuals may or may not agree But those are the two sides and I think when we think about open-source software Going forward against things like Software as a service solutions in the cloud. This is really the challenge that we need to face You know, how do you preserve the freedom to tinker the freedom to experiment in this world? And I would argue and I'm I'm picking one of you know while my company's community product projects here open Open-shift origin, but I think as a general principle. I think open-source does have this potential You know through thinking about distribution through thinking about packaging You know some of the things Langdon was talking about others have been talking about in terms of how we can make can we make a packaging experience in linux and in open-source software Projects were generally better To bring those things together into polished platforms into polished distributions into polished whatever you want to call them While still retaining the ability to say oh, I'm going to use a different CICD system than Jenkins. I'm going to use a different orchestrator than Kubernetes and so forth and I think as we look forward. I mean this is From my perspective one of the central things the open-source projects the open-source communities need to think about this idea of Sass aggressively bundling giving you the power the you know the power of convenience as Former analyst analyst colleague of mine Stephen O'Grady has called it While taking advantage of the open-source Unbundling so getting that smooth experience But with the capability to have that freedom to tinker with the software and take in the direction that you want it So thank you Thanks for your talk There's one minute for questions one question if anyone wants No Good great. Thank you. I do have some cards with a book link if anyone wants it up here