 Good morning, Drupalcon Los Angeles! Hey, how many of you have gone to some awesome sessions this week? Oh, wait, I couldn't quite hear you. What was that? How many of you have gone to some awesome sessions? How many of you have been sprinting? Oh, no, don't just raise your hand. Give me a whoo! There we go. How many of you went to an awesome Drupalcon party last night? I actually expected that to be relatively quiet because I think a few people are going to be straggling in just a little bleary eyed. I'm Josh Mitchell. I am the CTO of the Drupal Association. Holly touched on this the other day. Drupal powers the best of the web. The Drupal Association is here to unite you, the global community of open source developers and designers and project managers and people who are really passionate about building and promoting Drupal. We, the Drupal Association, the people who are involved in building Drupal.org, we want Drupal.org to be the best of the web. And we have to work with the community to make that happen. You guys are going to be the ones that make that transformation real. Now, I want to take a brief minute to talk a little bit about who's involved in Drupal.org. We have an awesome team that I've built up over the last year at the Drupal Association. We have lots of folks and designers and developers and people who can really focus on making Drupal.org an awesome product. But it's not just staff that are doing this. We have so many people involved. We've got a software working group that is working with us on tools and features and some great advisors to that group. We have an infrastructure team that is helping us build an incredible set of systems and platforms. Our systems push over 20 terabytes of data a month. Thank you. I always want to do the time range wrong with that. 20 terabytes of data a month through our various systems and through our CDNs that are around the world. The infrastructure team is critical to that. We have some awesome volunteers in that area that are helping our team keep Drupal.org stable, secure, performant. It's awesome. We have a content working group that are helping us build a better content system behind Drupal.org, better content on Drupal.org. A newly formed licensing working group that are helping us make sure that we keep everything in line with the licensing GPL v2 plus that Drupal.org is under. We have a marketing committee that's recently formed that's helping us create great materials to promote Drupal all around the world. We also have those core working groups that are a part of the project, the initiative leads, the core maintainers, the technical working group, the documentation working group, the security working group, the community working group. This is a huge set of individuals that are critical to the work that we do. They are advising us, they are helping us connect with the community, they are helping us do the work. I just want to take a second because people like Angie and George and Jeff and Roy and David and Kathy and Ryan and Michael and Greg and Ben and Alex and Jeremy and Howard and Boris and Lee and Adam and Donna and Joe and Andrew and Kevin and Larry. Thank you. You have no idea how hard it is to translate the user name into their first name all the way through that slide. It takes a lot of practice. These people have helped us do an amazing job in setting a strategic roadmap from Drupal.org. Many of you have heard me do this little presentation in spiel, I'm just going to give you a real quick summary of some of the things that we're focused on. We've been some huge improvements to the account creation process on Drupal.org that they've been involved in. We've got a much better spam fighting technique in place at this point. We've really reduced the amount of effort that our community members have to spend fighting that. We've done some great profile improvements, both for users and organizations. Dries touched on on the keynotes, some of the organizational credits that are possible now. If you're contributing on behalf of your company or on behalf of a customer, mark that in the issue cues. It's really important to give credit back to the organizations that are helping funding the great work on Drupal.org. It's very powerful for our ecosystem to be able to do that. We're also doing some great work around content strategy and redesign on Drupal.org. Exciting changes are on the way to make Drupal.org much easier to use, make the flow of content on Drupal.org a lot easier, and to get the right people involved in creating that. I don't know if any of you had a chance to see the presentation yesterday about issue workflow and some of the get improvements we're planning. Exciting stuff is coming. You need to take a look at that presentation if you get a chance. We also want to make Drupal.org search usable. It's almost there. We got some improvements we can make there. We also want to make it easier for learners and skilled users to find and select projects for building their solution. And we're going to be migrating groups.drupal.org, getting it upgraded to the latest and greatest and giving you new features and tools for managing your local user groups, the interest groups, for managing around projects, some important content that is related to that. We've also been squeezing in some other work. How many of you really enjoyed the registration process this year with Drupal.org? Yeah. It's really exciting to fill out a registration form. The good news is the next time you fill that out, it's actually going to remember a lot of your information because we're now building all off of a single site that is kind of like the master event site from here on out. It's going to make it so much easier going forward for us to highlight great things associated to Drupal.con. We've been doing some amazing work with the community for Drupal Continuous Integration, Drupal CI. That's our testing and test spot servers. We're doing quite a bit of upgrades to that environment and working it much more flexible for testing many more things. We've got localize.drupal.org that is going to be undergoing an upgrade to Drupal 7 in the next week or so, and that is also a major DA blocker that we're getting out of the way, so very excited about that. We've been doing some great things with the infrastructure, stabilizing and improving it and making it more performant. The pages load a lot faster. We've got content delivery networks that are pushing Drupal.org all around the world. We cannot do this without you. Thank you for your support. I also want to take a minute to thank the supporting partners. The supporting partner program is critical for us because it basically funds our infrastructure and our staff that are focused on Drupal.org. If your organization is not a supporting partner and you want to become one, please stop by the Drupal Association booth and we can set you up with someone to talk to you about. And I also want to take a minute to thank the technology supporting partners, companies such as Fastly and MailChimp that are actually helping provide part of the services for Drupal.org. They're committed to open source, making that awesome. We also have the premium hosting supporters and this is an important spot for Drupal because performance and scalable hosting is critical to a Drupal site. We have partners like Acquia Blackmesh and Pantheon who have recently joined our tri-Drupal program, and they link to a hosted demo of Drupal that you can fire up in 20 minutes or less right off the homepage of Drupal.org. And that's an important way for us to drive adoption of Drupal is to give people a chance to try Drupal at its very best. Also, thank you to the DrupalCon sponsors. You guys are awesome. You've made this week phenomenal. Best DrupalCon ever, right? You guys are still really tired. I can fell it. But the good news is we've got coffee to help with that. Coffee breaks. So you can pay for coffee all day in the 300 aisle of the exhibit hall. There's also a free coffee break sponsored by Isovera and SiteGround that will be directly after the keynote today. So be sure to fill up and wake up. Wi-Fi. As you all know, Wi-Fi access at this point. Please be kind and limit your total number of devices. And if you happen to have a Wi-Fi device, please turn that off while you're in the keynote. It helps our systems run a little bit better. Food. We've been having some good food. I've really enjoyed the lunches this week. Vegetarians, you can go through the main buffet lines. There is a separate line for vegan and other special meals. Please do not go through that line if you did not order that as a part of your registration because we want to make sure that there's enough food for those people who have those needs. Schedule changes. So Style Guide Drive Development will now take place today from 215 to 315 in room 409 A&B. And you guys are going to love this next one because I get to read this. Drupal and 3D, leveraging WebGL and X3 DOM for interactive 3D content visualization. Like that? Yeah. That's going to be from 1 to 2 in room 501. Everybody has been awesome this week. I just want to encourage you to continue to be awesome following the Code of Conduct. Feel free to see that. We've got it posted around. It's also online. And if you haven't bought your Drupal Store gear, you should swing by the Drupal Store. It's over in the exhibit hall. You've only got between now and about... What time does the Drupal Store close? 3 o'clock. So right before the plenary at the end of the day. And I'm just going to let you guys all know this is a little bit sad, but we've run out of doggy sweatshirts. I know. We sold out of those things. If you have not done Trivia Night, sponsored by Palantir.net, I hope George heard that. So if you have not done Trivia Night before, you need to make it tonight. And you also get to be on my team because I get points for the fact that you're a newbie. But Trivia Night is tonight. You need to be there. It's going to be a 3-3 live. Doors open at 8. The Trivia starts promptly at 9. It is the most fun you will ever have at a DrupalCon. Jeff Eaton is one of the most hilarious MCs. He will make the night fly by. You're going to have a ton of fun learning about Drupal, yelling about the appropriateness of the answers, and generally having just a blast. Oh, thank you. We need volunteers for Trivia Night. We need some volunteer judges. So if you were interested in being a volunteer judge, please go to the registration desk after the keynote. Check in with them, and they will tell you next steps for that. Lastly, DrupalCon does not end today. We have contributions sprints that are happening all day on Friday, and I highly recommend getting involved. It's one of the keys to our community is if you haven't contributed before learning how to do that, if you have contributed before jumping in with others and getting important work done while at DrupalCon. We also have extended sprints throughout the weekend, and more information is on the website. Lastly, this is exciting. You have your little red bags? You need to look in your little red bag. There are 10 people at this conference that have a golden ticket, and that golden ticket will enter you to win a free ticket to DrupalCon in beautiful... I'm not going to tell you guys till 3. You guys are going to show up to play at the plenary. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, by the way, there have been people that have been breaking our terms of service by scraping the site looking for the location of the next DrupalCon. And we have contacted our security team. They will be tracking your IP back to your account, and you will be blocked. I'm just kidding. But it's actually been a lot of fun. We have thrown some stuff up there to throw off the scents. So if you think you know where the next DrupalCon is, you may not. So please come to the plenary session. With that, I am excited to announce our keynote speaker today. Matt A.C. is the VP of Mobile at Adobe, and with over 15 years of experience in open source, he is going to be rocking our world today. So thank you very much, and Matt, I'll let you take it from there. So now I'm a little nervous because I'm supposed to rock your world. And most of you are probably wondering, what in the hell is this guy doing here anyway? He works for Adobe. Why is he here speaking to us? What does he know about Drupal? Lots. So actually, before I joined Adobe, I spent years working in open source. I still sort of do it at Adobe, but for 15 years I spent around open source. And actually, I'm going to tell you specifically why... Oh, I was waiting for that to switch. Now I know that it's going to be over there. This really isn't user error. This is error, error. Oh, switched it. Ah, I see. There we go. Wrong clicker. So one thing that I want to address right at the start is, is this question, and why is he here? Because it's actually germane to the rest of my presentation. And the reason that all of us are here is because we're interested in not only, hopefully not only using Drupal and other open source technology, but also contributing to it. And the idea of an open source project being the province of one foundation or one worse one company, I think is wrong. We need to get beyond that and need to start thinking. My last company was MongoDB, a database company. And I remember the first time that IBM came to us and said, hey, we actually want to start contributing. And we were like, wait, you do DB2 that frankly stopped mattering about 100 years ago. But you're a database company. Why would you want to contribute to Mongo? And through the process of those conversations, and then we started talking to other database companies. And it turns out that MongoDB wasn't ours in the way that we thought it was. And we weren't as advanced, I think, as Drupal is, and the Drupal Foundation, because ultimately Mongo did feel like it was the company's database. Drupal is not Acquia's CMS. It's the community's or should be. And when I was talking with Dries beforehand, he was telling me, giving me some of the numbers. And yes, Acquia's the biggest contributor, corporate contributor to Drupal. But I think it was something like less than 5% or something on the order of 5% of the total contributions come from Acquia, which is kind of amazing. So why am I here? Well, the short answer is a few years ago, because Dries is Belgian, right? And so I bought him frets off the Grand Place in Brussels. And I thought that would open his heart. I think this was pre-Acquia. And so we met up one time. I can't remember who I was working for at the time, but we met up in eight. Later, that wasn't enough. So I invited Dries to my hometown, which is Salt Lake City, Utah, and said, why don't you come ski with me? And I'll make you pie, because I make lots of pie. And he seemed to like it. It seemed to resonate with him. And since that time, I just keep knock, knock, knocking on Dries's door. And it seems to have worked, because here I am with you, and I'm very, very grateful to be here with you. I'm going to talk about the... We're going to go back through a little bit of the past of open source, but really what I want to talk about is where open source needs to go to, and specifically where Drupal needs to get to, and where you individually need to get to, be extraordinarily successful. So first stage of open source, and I lived through this. I've been involved in open source since 2000, and I think I remember the fear, so I was at an embedded Linux company called Linio, later called Embedix, and later acquired by Motorola. You can acquire it by Motorola. You know how well that went. Not very well. But Richard Stallman was the patron saint of free software, and also struck absolute terror into the hearts of every single corporate attorney out there. And so I worked with Evan Moglin from the Free Software Foundation on ways that we could build this GPL compliance center, the FSF, the Free Software Foundation could make some money. They could give some assurance to the companies that I was working with, the Toshivas, et cetera, of the world that they wouldn't get sued over the GPL, and that was the state that we lived in. It was kind of... Open source is sort of interesting, but it's petrifying to us. And then IBM came along in 2001 and said, we're going to put a billion dollars into Linux, and suddenly everything changed. And people said, if IBM can do this open source thing, then maybe we can too. And the wheels, I was going to say, the doors opened and everyone started embracing it, but started embracing it in a way that I don't think was very healthy. The idea was that we're going to build, or we're going to give away lots of free stuff. And I worked for a few of these companies that provided free and good enough was kind of that we're the open source documentum. We're the open source DEA. We're the open source, whatever it was. But the idea was always that the proprietary product was the better product, and we were just commoditizing it. And that was good enough because we're giving you lots of free stuff. And that used to be open source. But something significant changed, and it's really been over just the last few years that that has changed. And that is that open source is no longer, if it ever was, and I think it kind of was, but open source has become not just the commoditizer or commodifier of other people's technology, but really the innovator. People don't use Drupal because it's a nice copy of Interwoven or Vignette or whatever old school web CMS. People use it because it's better. Because it gives you more power to do things. People don't use Hadoop because it's a cheap alternative to an enterprise data warehouse. They use it because increasingly it's better than those things. At a cost profile that an old school enterprise data warehouse simply can't match. Same for Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra, all these different things Android on the mobile. These are the innovators today. Open source is the innovator. But we still think of it as free stuff that just kind of flows in and we're blessed to be able to use it. And we are a nation or a world full of users of open source and not necessarily of contributors there too. And I want to argue that this is wrong, but rather than me doing it, I'm going to let John Candy do it. Joker wants the race. It's ridiculous. All right, come on. Let's go. Let's go. Put your window down. He wants something. He's probably drunk. Yeah, how would he know? Thank you. Thanks a lot. Terrific. I can use open source. I don't know what he's talking about. I don't really need to contribute. Not a big deal. It is not just they don't know where I'm going. How the hell would they know where we're going? It is emphatically the wrong way to think about open source. And I'm going to drill into why that's the case. Both the why we should be contributing more to open source and the how, because the how is what trips us up often. And part of the reason is you look around, and this is Stephen O'Grady from Redmont, and Stephen has this... Everything Stephen writes is fantastic, but in this I think he was dead on where he says, who's your new competitor? And he was speaking to open source companies, but he says your new competitor is your customer. All of that are much of that technology that I was pointing to earlier. That's really at the leading edge of innovation. It wasn't developed by Red Hat. It wasn't developed by Alfresco. It wasn't developed by Adobe. It was developed not by software companies that sell software. It was developed by companies that produce lots of software in furtherance of their businesses, which are completely different, basically advertising businesses for the most part. But it's being written by Facebook, with Cassandra, or LinkedIn with Kafka, or Google that inspired Hadoop. And now it's released Bigtable and these other things. It's these companies that are contributing a lot of this fantastic technology. And guess what? That's accelerating, and that's going to continue for a long, long time. So the industry has changed, and the nature of the software business has changed. And again, there's this idea, well, let's just hop on a board. The Free Rider Express. This is fantastic. Look at all this great software that I get to use. But phase four of Open Source is going to be where we learn to contribute, where we learn to submit that pull request and then merge, speaking GitHub terms. So let's take a step back. There's little doubt that Open Source has gotten bigger and bigger, whether you measure it by lines of code, whether you measure it by cumulative Open Source projects, and this is just focused on mobile and the acceleration that mobile has produced in the number of Open Source projects. If you look at the number of GitHub committers or users and repositories, it's just going up dramatically, year after year after year. Even more impressive is when you say, okay, well, that's general Open Source. That's general software. What about in more niche? I mean, there's nothing niche about healthcare, but in a particular vertical, when you look at healthcare or you look at government, this is really encouraging. But it's still mostly people using software. Lots of people using software. I kind of asked Twitter all of it. You can see my question, and I quote the future of Open Source survey that Black Duck and Northbridge ventures, and I think Acquia may have participated in this as well, that found that 78% of companies admit to running Open Source software to power their businesses. And as I equipped, well, the other 22% are lying, because, of course, they're using it for their businesses, and the person that they just happened to be surveying just didn't know that, but it's absolutely happening. And Van Lindberg from OpenStack says, well, a few years ago, we found that it was actually closer to 95%, and understated by 90%, even of those understated by 90%. This is the world we live in. Now, on those charts that I showed earlier, did you notice anything unusual? We're looking at the up-and-to-the-right sort of trajectory, but there's something unusual about each one of those charts, with the exception of the latest one that I showed, GitHub, as they were trying to show something that's a recent phenomenon. And that is that most of those stop around 2010, 2012, no one's really studying it anymore. No one's looking at the growth of Open Source because it's just kind of become a given. And if you do a Google book search, looking for the prevalence of the term Open Source, and I compared it to the railroad, when something becomes furniture, when it becomes just a standard way of doing things, it just kind of fades into the background. And we see that with Open Source, it's still rising, although if I just focused on the Open Source component here, what you actually see is a flattening out. And right where we're at now, Open Source is as a term that's mentioned that people care about and talk about in books, is starting to taper off a little bit, just as the railroad has done for years. And if we started railroad back in 18... Actually, I don't know when the railroad was invented, somebody who's an engineer could tell me, but let's say the 1800s to be safe, you'd see it like in a sharp decline where it once was big, a big deal. And that just kind of faded into the background. Not because it wasn't important, but because it wasn't top of mind. And the same thing is happening with Open Source. It's just becoming how we do things. But again, mostly it's become how we use things. It's what the software that we use. Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat a few years back, made this what I thought was a fantastic statement. And I'm actually going to read it, which I don't normally like to do from the standpoint, just in case you can't read, or if you want to read along with me, the vast majority of software today is written in the enterprise and not for resale. And basically he's channeling Eric Raymond here from the Cathedral in the Bazaar. The vast majority of that is never actually used. The waste in IT software development is extraordinary. And you think about that. If most of the world's software is not created by Acquia, is not created by Adobe, is not created by IBM, is not created by Oracle, most of the world's software is written at Citigroup. Or at... You've got to stop taking my pictures. It's making me nervous. I didn't tell anybody I was coming here today, so I'm just going to get back to the folks at Adobe and they're going to wonder, why was he talking to the people at Drupal? It's by normal businesses that write all this software. And where does it sit? It sits within the four walls of their firewall or behind the four walls of their firewall, never benefiting anyone. And frankly, often not even benefiting the people within that enterprise. Think of the waste. We can estimate the size of the IT business or the software business in the billions. But that's maybe 5% of the total pie. Add that other 95%. That's a gargantuan amount of software and of software value that's locked up. So when Jim talks about this, it says, ultimately, for open source to provide value for all of our customers worldwide, we need to get our customers not only as users of open source projects, but truly engaged in open source and taking part in the development community. He's speaking from what he sees every day, talking to these companies. That they're paying Red Hat money. But he's also seeing the colossal waste. Red Hat can still make money in the world not waste money. There's signs of this getting better. I saw this headline a few months back and I was kind of blown away at it. It's a headline of two financial services companies working together, collaborating. Because it turns out that they all need CRM. They all need. And as I heard one year from the head of IT for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts who said, you know what, we need the states working together because guess what? We all need to write parking tickets. We all need to do voting systems. We all have all these common needs and we all write them ourselves over and over and over again. Speaking of that waste that Jim Whitehurst pointed out. And then in areas where rather than counting up dollars making a real difference in the health of citizens, in this case in emerging markets or in emerging economies, this is a big deal. And it's starting to happen. You look at the government users on GitHub and these could just be people sitting there to pilfer code or to free ride on others' code. But if you look at the number of repositories, remember this slide? These aren't just lurkers. These are increasingly people doing something with that code. Now why? Why contribute? And actually one of the GitHub founders wrote this great blog post about this. The first is, and some of these are going to be just common sense and you say, well, you're going to nod your head and say, of course. The first is the ability to do more with more. Do more with less of your own resources but more with more of the resources that are here. And I think of a conversation that I was having with Drees this morning about Acquia and the amount it contributes. It looks like a big contributor in terms of the other top 10 contributors. And I think he showed this slide during his keynote earlier this week. But if you look at the overall contributions to Drupal, it's actually a small percentage. That's fantastic. That's the way open source is supposed to work. That's healthy. And it means Acquia and everyone else in this room gets this force multiplier by buying into and digging into the Drupal community. That's what you want. That's the first thing. And that's maybe one of the more standard benefits that we talk about with open source. The other is, another is, you get to help steer the ship. Heartbleed hit the first company of which I'm aware that really got to do anything about it that knew about it was Google, or certainly among the first. And why? Because Google had engineers working at Heartbleed and you could say, well, they should have seen the problem before it hit. Maybe. That often we won't have the benefit of that. We get hindsight. And that hindsight is either immediate hindsight or months later hindsight. In the case of Google, before it became a really known issue, they were able to go and start fixing the problem behind the scenes. So it's protection in case of problems. But more positively, it's this ability to steer the project where you'd like. I'm willing to bet there are people in this room that care a lot about the future of Drupal and may have different needs than Acquia or one of the other contributors to it. So you either have the option of sitting around waiting for somebody else to meet your needs or you can get involved and contribute and write the code that you need or help maintain the code that somebody else has maybe sponsored that you want to see flourish. But again, the currency of open source is contribution. It's code. And as important as it is, well, I'll come back to that. I want to anticipate a later argument because I want you to be wowed when I come to that slide. That was a fantastic point, Matt, and you didn't already make it. But think about this, this ability to be a part of the team that creates the project. And you're going to have to choose, of course, where you contribute, because not everything will be equally important to you, but it's really, really important that you help steer. Here's an example. So at the Open Business Conference a year or so ago, the dish network CTO got up and said, you know, we're dumping Oracle, we have all these problems, we're going to go to Kafka. And I hope, he didn't say this, but I hope what he meant is we're going to start using Apache Kafka and that means that we dish are going to start becoming a contributor to Kafka. Otherwise, he's going to have the exact same problem with Kafka or a similar problem to Kafka that he had with Oracle. I want to say it was Oracle. I like to pick on Oracle, so let's assume that it was Oracle that did something wrong. I apologize if you work for Oracle. I mean, really, I apologize if you work for Oracle. There's a chance you could still go to heaven, unlikely, but there is a chance. Yeah, I saw somebody really wanted to clap. Go ahead and clap for that. I mean, they're Satan. Let's be honest. He used to be Microsoft, and then we started to feel sorry for Microsoft, and then it became Oracle that was the great Satan. But they're going to fall into the same trap, which is waiting on somebody else to fix all their problems, to take care of their needs. With the database in this article in the Wall Street Journal, the CTO talks about how critical the database is for them and how it's a real differentiator for them. And he goes through all these reasons for why Kafka makes sense for them. But what he never says, and again, hopefully is what he meant, but what he never says is, and therefore, we're going to contribute. Otherwise, he's going to be sitting back with this highly strategic thing database for their company, waiting on somebody else to fix the problems, to steer the ship, et cetera. Recipe for failure. One thing that companies like Netflix have totally got, and I have a great quote, or I think it's a great quote, from James Pierce at Facebook over to the side, and that's when you ask developers, and actually, let's skip forward and then I'll skip back, your developers, you may be developers, so maybe you're nodding your head at this, if you're not a developer and you run IT or you run the web for your company, guess what your developers are doing all the time? Probably not on Facebook, maybe they are. They're probably watching Game of Thrones, yes, on company time. But what they're doing on average seven hours a week is working on side projects. Often, those are open source projects that they're working on. They're doing that because that's what they find fulfilling, and so if you go back to this hierarchy of developer needs, and you'll see on there, hopefully you can see on there because the colors are not that great, but right in the middle are money, I need to get paid, maybe this would change if they were living on starvation wages, but they're most developers today or not. So money is not really the biggest issue. If you go down to the fat part of the pyramid, the things that really drive them, it's personal fulfillment. It's this desire to express themselves through code and get all the positive feedback that comes with that. Now imagine that you are giving them employment where you strip all that away from them, and they've got to work on a crappy internal intranet without any hope of ever getting to do anything really fun and cool or to work on these things. That's what they're looking for. So if you want to attract great talent, and James Pierce says a large percentage of the people that come to us wanted to come because they knew about the great open source work that we did, and also as you follow this quote on, which I didn't include, he says, and they knew sort of the problems that we're working on, and it excited them to be able to come work on that. I remember years ago talking with the Acria guys, talking about Drupal, and there was a large entertainment company here in Los Angeles area that I think had 500 Drupal sites, and the trick was for them, like figuring out how to make sense of all those and to manage them. And then think about if you're a developer wanting to work with this entertainment company or having the potential to work there, and you want to work on big problems, imagine if they had spun up an open source project within the Drupal community, and they were using Drupal for this. If that were somewhat public, at least within the developer realm, and they could see, wow, I might get to work on that if I go to work at this company, that attracts great talent. It also helps you to evaluate great talent. So Google, I think, has gotten rid of these, I think, inane interview questions, how many angels will fit on the head of a pin if they're dancing the foxtrot, and you're like, oh, I'm a genius there, I'm gonna figure this out. But the best way to figure out if somebody's a good engineer is to look at their pull requests, to look at their GitHub profile to see what they're doing. Why would you ever take interview questions over real-world experience, which is written in code? This is a great way to evaluate technical talent. Now, it's a crappy way to evaluate people like me, because I can't really code. So this would be a bad way to say, Matt, you're fired, we haven't seen you contribute anything to GitHub in a while, and I'd say you're right, but I write lots of blog posts. Does that count? No. So this is a good way to evaluate talent, and frankly, it's an excellent way of retaining talent. Again, what do developers want to work on? They want to work on open source. They want to work on big, meaty problems that are interesting. You can give them lots of pizza, and that's only gonna go so far. If all you give them is pizza, they will die in your employment. So bad strategy. So assuming that the company's here, and I'm gonna assume the people in the Drupal community are kind of on the cutting edge of this, and you don't really need, I mean, maybe some of that was useful for you, but you don't really need someone to tell you, although as I understand from Jerry's, this has been a topic of debate or a topic of discussion for a few of the last few Drupal cons. So maybe you do. I'm the school marm up here telling you what you should do, but part of the problem, what are the reasons that we don't contribute and how can we do more? One of the primary reasons when companies or individuals are really astute about open source, one of the reasons that they don't contribute is that they recognize that it's not easy. James Stewart at the UK's government digital service told me this one time. He said, you know, we don't think about... He actually didn't even call it open source. He says, you know, we do some coding in the open and some open source. I said, well, what's the difference? He said, well, they're all MIT licensed. So I said, in most people's minds, that would mean it's open source. And he was only willing to call it open source if they had invested the resources, the community resources to make it work. So it wasn't just about the code. It was about fostering community. It was about writing good documentation. And if you go to the... If you could Google this and... Or Bing it, if you wish. Or even Yahoo! Is that still exist? I think it probably does. I'm sure I'm getting in trouble by angering somebody. I work for Yahoo! But it's the effort that goes into making that code useful for other people that causes some to shy away from open source. And that's an understandable position to take. There's a really good way of dealing with that. And that is to focus in on that code that matters most to you. So Adam Comerford is a former colleague of mine at Mongo and he wrote this to me. And I just thought it was dead on. And the idea is that if you say, hey, what's all the open source that's important to you? You're gonna come up probably, if you're honest, with a long list. But if you then say, what is the code that's so important to you that you will drop everything and invest the resources to make it successful? Community resources, et cetera. That list is gonna be really short. That is the place where you should be contributing. And I'm guessing since there's people here that are investing time to travel to Drupal Con, that you feel that Drupal is one of those things, or Drupal are one of the modules that make up the fantastic ecosystem that is Drupal, that you feel like Drupal deserves your time. And you're probably right. I can't speak for you because I don't know what your corporate priorities are or your individual priorities are, but I would suggest that you probably are right. You probably should be contributing more to Drupal. And if it's important enough to your business, to your livelihood, you'll find ways to make those sacrifices necessary to do the documentation, to commit the developer time that you or your team needs to do to make it successful. But it's really focusing in. And then there are, of course, other things that you can do when the sponsors were listed off. That is one way of contributing to open source. Give money. I don't personally think it's ultimately the best way for the reasons that I expressed before that need to control your own destiny, but it is a valuable way. And for somebody like me who's not a code monkey, it may be the only way that I ever get recognized as a contributor to Drupal or another open source project. So that is a way. And then, of course, there are other ways. It doesn't have to be code. It can be data. The city of Chicago has been a leader in this. I think no one's done better than the city of Chicago when it comes to opening up their data in lots of interesting ways. Or it can be, maybe you don't code, you can help test. Maybe you don't code like me, you can write about it, you can help evangelize the technology. There are ways that you can contribute to Drupal or to the other projects that are most used to you. But I'll end on this. Remember this slide? Remember that time that your developers, that you are already giving to open source projects. And maybe for lots of people in this room, the average of seven hours a week is already being spent on Drupal. Think about all that time that people are already willing to give and then get out of their way. Because often what's needed is not for you, and here I'm not speaking to the developers in the room, I'm speaking to the people who may have responsibility, may have management responsibility for a team of developers. Often what's needed for you is not to actually proactively do anything, it's to stop getting in your developer's way. The Red Monk analyst firm, James Governor in particular, has fond of talking about developers as the new kingmakers or queenmakers, sovereign makers. Let's find something neutral. And I believe firmly that that's true. And if it's true, it means that we need to be doing everything that we can, everything possible to enable those developers to be successful. And that's going to mean enabling them to write more open-source software. In that same future of open-source survey that I referenced earlier at BlackDoc does, they kind of bemoaned that I think, I can't remember the number, but let's say half of the companies out there still don't have any sort of an open-source compliance program or an office of open-source. And when I hear that, I think that's fantastic. It's my first or second job when I was at Novell years and years ago as I was part of the open-source review board. And maybe in 2004, 2003, when we did that, maybe then it was needed, although I kind of don't think so. It's certainly not needed today. We don't need lots of cumbersome policies around how to use open-source, when to use open-source. Developers are pretty smart. What we need is to get out of their way and let them write code and contribute because that is what they want to do anyway. So I guess my final bit of advice is forget everything that I said before and just remember one thing. Your developers already want to write open-source software. They already want to contribute. What is needed is for you and for me to get out of their way. Thank you. Thank you so much. So welcome to the Dragonstone. Come have a seat. This is the fantastic thing about our community is that we are open and transparent and my goodness, on Twitter, they have questions for you. I did warn them ahead of time, everyone, that we were going to be polite with our questions and you've done a pretty fantastic job with that. But the first one, of course, that came up, you work for Adobe. What's up with that? How do you reconcile this free and open-source thing with Adobe? Well, you can't see, but I am wearing a hair shirt. I just walk around paying pennants all day long. No, actually, I mean, so I don't... I tried to... I anticipated that question and I tried to answer a little bit at the beginning of my talk and I'm not really sure what it means to work for an open-source company anymore. For years, I worked for open-source companies and I actually like the way that Adobe deals with open-source. Do I do what I like to see as contributing more software? Absolutely. But I kind of like the honesty with which the company does it and I think this is true of Acquia. This is true of, I think, the best companies around open-source is that when Acquia contributes to Drupal, it contributes openly to Drupal, but then it also has a fair amount of code that it keeps proprietary and that's just... I mean, there's no hidden smoke and dagger or cloak and dagger about how it's done. Same thing is true at Adobe. We are heavy contributors to PhoneGap or heavy contributors to Jackrabbit and other Apache projects and then we write lots of proprietary software and I would rather that actually than some of my past employers where the company was the community. I always kind of hated that and it made it hard to be honest with what little community was there and actually I think that's one of the main reasons that the communities around those projects never really grew is because you were always second guessing what the company was really up to. One of the things that I do love is that you are inside this big corporate entity which does have a clear separation between open and closed-source software. There must be an advocacy role that you play within the company to try and encourage the suits, dare I say, to participate in those open-source communities and sometimes it may be code contributions or financial contributions. What are the arguments that you have found most effective when trying to win people over to open-source? What's interesting is, and I don't know if this is because open-source has become another way of saying, another way of just when you say open-source really what you mean is developers, often at Adobe. I'm not really speaking for all of it. Well, I'm not speaking for Adobe but I'm not speaking for the creative cloud side of the business because I work on the digital marketing side but certainly on the digital marketing side the question is always it's not so much open-source versus proprietary, it's really about developers versus our core customer which is today it's the marketing department and so really it's, the question is rarely about open-source and it's usually about what do we do are developers important to this and increasingly the answer is yes and it's been phone gap when we acquired phone gap the number one thing that's kind of woken people up and for years they didn't have to worry about that they just had to worry about the web team with Omniture and then other acquisitions that came and now for the first time the company is having to say oh, actually developers really matter and when I say the company again I'm speaking of the marketing side of the business and so open-source comes up as a well if we care about developers we really have to speak their language as open-source the interesting thing when I say that though the interesting we don't it used to be so clear to me open-source good, proprietary software bad and then the company actually that causes the most confusion for me is Apple it's hard to imagine a more proprietary company on the face of the planet and yet it's hard to imagine a company that has captured the imagination of developers like app developers and whatnot and I've struggled with that of trying to figure out why that would be the case and I guess they've been open enough to allow developers to build great things on their platform but I do sometimes wonder if it's a different kind of developer than the developers that I've been used to working with in open-source land Do you mean to say not all developers are the same? Yeah and actually it sounds funny when you say it like that but I did kind of assume that all developers were the same and I knew that there were some developers over in Microsoft land who weren't real developers because they allowed a sweaty Steve Bomber to sing to them and that was somehow cool but so I knew that there were but I just thought they weren't real developers and I've seen that that's wrong and actually Acquia or Drupal years ago I don't know if it's the Drupal Foundation or Acquia when they did the partnership or some sort of an announcement with Microsoft that was one of those times where I was like wait a second we can all get along there's not evil and good it's more complicated than that that was an eye-opener for me and strangely disconcerting but ultimately healthy Now it may have been a bit of a leading question to then sort of come back to this next part I'm a recovering developer you're not a developer at all and yet we've got the stage right now so in terms of the modern definition of what an open source community looks like it's not necessarily the developers who are claiming the stage and bringing other people into the community and really I think that I wrote down here your four phases of open source development so we had fear, we had free but crappy stuff we then had free and awesome stuff and you had give and take as the number four and I feel like the number five is fostering communities of collaboration and that could be individuals that could be corporations and I feel like there's a next step what do you think? Yeah, I actually think that's so if you look at and here again it's hard to draw hard and fast rules but you look at and I've tried but you look at successful communities and you have communities that are run by effectively A-holes this is a family conference and I actually don't swear much anyway but it's effective and then you look at and I'm not going to put you decide does Drupal fall into that category or is Drupal run by a very benevolent sweet man who's generous and good I think it's probably more the latter but they're run by different kinds of people and I think one of the reasons that good open source projects are able to attract good contributions is precisely because they have managed to embrace all sorts of contributions from hardcore coders the 10x developers the mythological 10x developer to people like you, people like me that that give to that community just in different ways we give code in alternative ways or at least in my case I don't give code at all but I can write about MySQL or I can write about these things and help popularize it even if I'm not able to write the code one of the examples you gave was the collaboration between banks, Barclays and Combank what kind of community do you think they would end up with if they were to end up with an open source product or do you think that it wouldn't be open source can I say cabal, is that a little bit too provocative? No, I mean the reality is probably on their first try that is what they would end up with exactly that and I don't know I would guess most of the people in this room are If you were able to consult with them if you were able to go in and say I think this is the way that you should proceed what would be your advice to them? I would tell them that they need to find some way similar to the Drupal Foundation they need a foundation to shepherd the code it can't be under the auspices of one of those companies years and years ago I can't remember what it was called but we had a few companies in Minneapolis of all places that were that tried to start an open source co-op and it kind of fell apart in part because it was never truly it was never truly open source it was kind of like, hey we're going to get together and share code between ourselves and it was targeting and I'm trying to remember the other Minneapolis companies and it just never worked I think it has to be open for me that really means it needs to come under a foundation and then you just have to have the expectation with something like that you're probably not going to ever have it's never going to be Drupal it's never going to be Linux because those serve everyone needs a web page or a web presence everyone needs an operating system remember what Commonwealth Bank and the other are actually in Barclays are actually doing but I know by definition it's not going to be something that everyone in the world needs and so you just have to scale back your ambition as to who's going to use this and if you have 50 different employees from 50 different banks using it I would say that's probably a success far different from the 3,000 or so people that contribute to Drupal is there anything that you were hoping I would ask you that I haven't asked you yet well I'm glad you did I'm glad there are no more Adobe questions the you know there's a question that I ask myself all the time and but I don't have an answer to that and that is what is the right open source community what is the right model and I've struggled to identify so that I could pattern it and then model it and then build a company or a community around it at the different companies that I've been at and I think ultimately the answer is it varies and there is no one right answer which is a really frustrating frustrating thing to say because it means that's something like Drupal you couldn't say ah this is exactly what Dries in the community have done I'm going to go take it over to Alfresco or Adobe or somebody and I'm going to do the exact same thing and it's going to work because ultimately a community is made up of individuals and there's only one Dries and there's only one Linus Torvalds and there's and you can't really replicate it you kind of have to do what's right for your community so within the larger Drupal community it seems to be working but within the there are gazillions of little sub projects within Drupal and figuring out what the right way to manage those is I think is an individual endeavor and unfortunately there is no one size that's all no one right answer again back to diversity unfortunate but true this has been absolutely fantastic I know there are a lot of additional questions on Twitter however it can sometimes be a bit intimidating to read the comments after one's own presentation if we were to filter questions to you would you be able to provide a reply? I would love to and I've been writing long enough dangerous in the comments nothing you guys could say would offend me well maybe you could try let's see if we everyone try to offend me but I will be on Twitter right after this answering questions trading my hair shirt for a bulletproof vest and we'll go from there thank you for your time and for your good humor thank you