 Hi everyone appreciate you being here for the next half hour with me instead of getting an early start on the food truck lines Let's just jump into it I want to do a little housekeeping first if you have some constructive comments you want to make my Twitter handle is up here It's on the bottom of every slide the conference hashtag. I know that there is Some confusion about which hashtag to use that's the one the conference organizers say to use so that's the one I suggest you use If you have non-constructive comments you can keep them to yourself Nobody will be harder on me after this presentation than I will so you really don't need to jump in Now when people give talks they usually have some sort of disclaimers at the beginning Telling you all the things that you're not supposed to think and I have that too First of all this is not my employer's opinions. I'll full disclosure I work for Red Hat nobody at Red Hat has seen this deck or has really talked to me about this very much at all I'm glad my management is not in the room because that makes me feel a little more comfortable This is not my projects opinions. I'm the Program manager for Fedora and for CentOS stream. I'm involved in some other projects as well Nobody in those projects believes these things I say and you know what I'm not even sure I believe the some of the things I say in this talk and So as you're going through here, you might you might be thinking yourself. Wow, this guy's an idiot What is he talking about? This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard At some point later in the talk, I may argue against myself So just hold on to the end at the end if you still think I'm an idiot. Well, that's fair and The biggest disclaimer is you'll notice the talk title had a question mark at the end and I am really not here to give answers. I am here to ask questions As I was rehearsing this I did realize that actually I'm I am giving something approaching like quasi answers Throughout especially towards the end, but these are really more like sort of suggestions or just like idle thoughts. I've had they're not Answers I'm not here to say this is what we should do next So what even are we talking about right? So this was inspired by a conversation that I had with D'alissa Alexander who's red hats executive vice president and chief people officer One of the projects that this talk does not represent the opinions of is opensource.com where I've been Correspondent for several years So every year we get together in Raleigh, North Carolina We talked to a red hat executive and they tell us how wonderful our writing is and we generally all pat each other on the back But a few weeks ago the site celebrated its 10th anniversary. So that was a lot of the subject of conversation back in October and We were talking about wow look how different the site looks Compared to ten years ago like it looks like a real website now And it's not this you know hacked together stuff and look how much the community has changed We have writers from inside red hat and outside red hat and some of the writers have been hired by red hat and some of the writers Have left red hat and like it's all over the community. It's all over the world. It's pretty great but the thing that that D'alissa talked about maybe the most was Okay, but ten years ago We are trying to like we were open source calm was like fighting to show people that open source is okay It's a thing you can use it's like useful and it's good for you and it's good for the world and all of this We had to like get people's mind share and now like ten years on and you know 2019 now 2020 People mostly get that like open is the default for a lot of things now And so I asked her I said all right. Well, that's great. We won Now what do we do? What's the next ten years? What are we trying to do now that we've convinced people that open source is an acceptable answer and She gave me a really thoughtful response And I was listening to her and not writing down any notes and I couldn't tell you what it was now And I really regret that because it was a really good answer And it wasn't like a specific answer it was just you know sort of like here's some general path we should go on but By the same token like I started thinking about it from my own perspective like what do I think About what the future should be It's like I said we won right like How about everybody except open source now? I realize this is one of the parts where you might say Ben's an idiot What's he talking about and so I'm gonna give you a just brief a bit of Evidence for the fact that we've won So if you remember back in 2001 Steve Balmer when he wasn't jumping up and down yelling about developers called Linux a cancer now most people have a very negative opinion of cancer for good reason and For Steve Balmer to equate Linux with cancer like that's that's a pretty strong sentiment right like that's not good so Steve's off owning a basketball team now and In 2015 Microsoft loves Linux Now I know a lot of people actually do not trust Microsoft on this fact but I'll share with you that for prior to working at Red Hat I worked at Microsoft for a while and They really do believe this now You can argue about whether it's like an actual deep philosophical understanding of how they are wrong and how Linux is actually great Or you can say well crap We're gonna if we want to keep making money in the years to come we need to get on board this Linux train and I would say it doesn't matter which one is the case because either way they're still providing their support so Another example of winning is you may remember remember that Ubuntu had bug number one in their bug tracker This is legitimately a bug they had in their tracker Microsoft has a majority market share and at some point Mark Shuttleworth Announced he was closing the bug now You can argue about whether or not that's appropriate Microsoft sells a pretty huge market share in desktop PCs But you know for years we've talked about the era of Linux on the desktop and it's here it's called Chrome OS and Again, you can say well, you know, I don't like Google and I don't like the way Google develops it They're not really like they're technically open source But they're not really embracing the community ethos and that's valid But it still checks all the boxes. So technically we won on that front And it's not just the software. It's you know open standards, too Jack Dorsey said hey, I'm gonna throw together a team and make Some decentralized standards for social media because you know email has a standard that's been around forever and email Just works you can email people across different domains and it all just magically happens sometimes Now again you can argue that Jack is kind of nuts and okay, well there's already been several attempts at this that Twitter has just bulldozed and You know Twitter had this itself in a way back when they still let third-party developers actually use the API and full disclosure I'm a third-party Twitter client developer and I hate them very much and I wish I could escape that site. I Just can't quit it Okay, so now what we've won we can't all retire to the beach because if we could I wouldn't be here right now I'd be on the beach I'd have a little bottle of whiskey and a stack of novels and I'd be sitting there all day under a really big Umbrella because redheads burn quickly But I one of the things I started thinking about is does our victory For you know, let's assume it exists for a moment. Does it explain some of the tumult we've seen in open source lately? Like it seems like we were all getting along and now we're not quite getting along as well as we used to Like we're writing new licenses to solve old problems so You know for a long time there was these license wars where the copy last left advocates were promoting You know the strong licenses that protected user freedoms and yet people advocating for permissive licenses that were really focused on Protecting developer freedoms and everybody kind of had the same idea of like free software is good open source Is good. Let's get it out there But we had some philosophical disagreements and that kind of reached a detente like we're not fighting each other over that as much Like we're maybe you're still sniping on the sides, but much like the editor wars are just kind of a joke now more than an actual fight Licenses were kind of like that But now we're seeing a bunch of new licenses crop up again Bruce parents quit the open source initiative because he Assumes that a license that he did not think was respecting freedom is going to be passed And that if you don't follow the OSI's license discuss mailing list Boy the discussion of that license has been just incredible Not always in the good sense But if it drove Bruce parents to quit OSI like that's not a minor thing, right? And I won't read Pam's quote to you because it's a lot of words And you're not supposed to stay in here and read words to your to your audience but Pam's a very smart person and I think she's right here that the line between the software and the data is kind of blurry And I'll come back to this here in a few minutes But people are trying to write new licenses and we're bringing back some of the old problems that we've had So one of the great examples of this is the Hippocratic license Which is named after the Hippocratic oath which many doctors take and it says first do no harm Like you can do whatever you want to your patient so long as you don't make it worse is the idea here and this came from Primarily driven by some actions of the US government and some of the some of its use of Open-source software that was used to do things that a lot of people found very morally repugnant and So basically the Hippocratic license said you can't do really terrible things with the software under this license Which I completely understand the sentiment You know if I write something I don't want to use to send like a busload of orphans off a cliff Like that's not how I envision the software being used But is it really open source because you can't you can't restrict field of endeavor and have it meet the OSI's definition of open source And so a lot of people like well, that's a fine license I suppose but it's not you can't call it open source like it's not an open source license no matter what else you do with it and You know there's some debate about like how do you draw the lines like you know Okay, I think most people would agree busload of orphans over the cliff is bad But like if your software is used to you know con people out of some money That's bad But is it bad enough like where do you draw the line? Can are you the only person who can use your software because you're the only person whose belief matches yours exactly? And again, if you're like me you might not actually believe all the things you believe The other thing that that's come to light again is the the whole concept of oh, no, this isn't a business model People like to think like oh, I'm gonna open source it and it's cool I'll get some people developing for it will make some money. I want to be great and yeah You can make money off open source. I know of a company that's done that fairly well But it's a development model right it's not a business model And so there have been a few companies that have kind of come to this conclusion They're like, oh, hey, we put something out under a permissive license and then Amazon used it under that license Following all the terms of it and made a whole buttload of money. I want money, too Well, I mean you make choices when you pick a license for something and there are trade-offs to any license you pick You have to be aware of what the consequences are This caused a lot of consternation when these companies changed the licensing MongoDB had was pulled from Fedora because the licenses no longer meets Fedora's requirements People will use other things instead or they'll just get it from outside the Fedora repos So this is a real thing and it's you know, it was a huge Blow up right like people were like, oh my gosh so You know winning isn't enough and you can ask well have we really won because I spent this time saying Here's how the ways we've won and then find out the ways like yeah But like there's still a lot of work to be done We're still kind of fighting each other again because now we're not focused on defeating the proprietary monster The monster while not dead is certainly weakened So the current state of technology it's kind of bad and We've done things we like to believe that the work we're doing is great It's gonna change the world most people that I've ever talked to Maybe don't believe that the code they write is gonna change the entire world But maybe it'll make things a little bit better like we're gonna incrementally make the world a better place for us That's not always true and sometimes we can get a little myopic about it The algorithm is not gonna save us Because it turns out what you feed to an algorithm to for like the machine learning parts is really important because you know turns out there was an algorithm that Said yeah, let's just give black people in the US less health care that doesn't seem right and You know maybe part of that was because for a few centuries in the United States There were some structural issues that kept black people from Accumulating generational wealth and we still see the effects of that And so maybe they can't afford to go to the doctor as much as the average white person or Asian person Like there's some bias that sort of built into the way society has happened for the last thousands of years and We need to make sure that we're not perpetuating it and reinforcing it with our algorithms So then Amazon was like hey we're gonna use AI to make smarter hiring decisions and we're gonna fix our diversity problems by By using this algorithm So we're all getting rid of our biases except that turns out when you tell the algorithm that all of our engineers Look like this right now It's gonna hire people that look like that. So you're just sort of perpetuating it They gave up on using that as far as they said There's entirely possible. There's some more evil going on under there face recognition software turns out The data set matters right You may have if you've flown from the if you flew here from the US You may have had facial recognition as you went through on your on your flight out of the US You may use your phone to unlock with your face or other things. You kind of want that to work, right? Like okay, so there's considerations of will it only match me will it not match my brother Or in my case like my son is a clone of me. Just you know 30 years younger Like you don't want somebody else to do it you don't want the data stored and used improperly You can't just rely on some math to save us so garbage in garbage out became garbage in garbage fire and Mostly not on purpose like there are some people out there who I won't name There's some people out there that I'm pretty sure just are in it to cause evil in the world Most people aren't but we're not necessarily aware of what we're doing we're not thinking about the ramifications of What we do and just because our software or our algorithms are open and available That doesn't mean bad effects don't happen from them. All right So now what? well What if there's just no such thing as winning? Like maybe winning is a thing we approach asymptotically But we never actually quite get there like the frog that jumps halfway to the wall every time now in reality The frog will eventually touch the wall because like physics, but you know mathematically That's not gonna happen So what if we could just keep working on that incremental improvement that we were talking about and this is the part where I Actually do kind of stop asking questions and start giving some ideas. They might be good ideas. They might be bad ideas They're certainly incomplete ideas But I would argue that While we were focused on software the last 10 20 30 years turns out the data is really what's important Which isn't to say that the software isn't important because it is but Open-source software without control and understanding of the data doesn't really help us so I'm gonna give a hot take and This is definitely among the things. I'm not sure I believe but I want to be a little spicy here. So You could argue and I might I'm still thinking about this But maybe free software is less important than protected and reliable data If you have free software and It's all out there and there's no such thing as proprietary software that doesn't necessarily mean we're not the data We provide to people won't be abused How many of you have looked through every source line of source code for all the software you run? Good, nobody's hand went up. I would call you a liar to your face I like we rely on the fact that lots of people are looking at it and they are and People are acting in good faith to try and fix bugs No, no software is bug-free unless it was never written So just because software is open-source that doesn't mean there's not a line in there It says copy all this data up to my secret server It might be found pretty quickly, but it could be there. It could be obfuscated So We can't just rely on free software open-source software to be the answer here We have to think about the data Because people will take the data and use it for bad purposes even you know I'm I'm sure the there's a lot of proprietary software involved in some of these Technologies that law enforcement, especially in the US are using to collect and analyze data But I can guarantee there's a ton of free software open-source software in there as well That didn't help. It's still being misused Another thing we could do is we can fix our people problems And what do I mean by fixing our people problems? Source ford recently had a blog post. It said open source is growing but not how it should It's basically the premise is people are contributing and the usage is going up But we're not necessarily bringing in the contributors the coders the maintainers in a sustainable way So we do have some people problems we can address there's not enough contributors I know a very few projects that are actually being used by people that would say We have all the developers we need we have all the documentation writers we need we have all the designers we need no But please nobody come help us You don't see that happen too often now they might do it by their actions and You know essentially say please we don't actually help us because we're jerks But nobody explicitly says that they always act like they won't help and our communities by and large are not Representative enough we have global communities global users Do our contributors communities look like our user communities? Do they work look like the world population at large? You can look around this room and say it's probably not representative of the people who use computers or even the people who contribute to open source software We can work on a variety of axes. We can talk about gender representation racial representation socio-economic representation Neurodiversity like there's a lot of different ways that people are different and we have to make sure that we're including them because we otherwise we get things like face software works for white men and not for other people or Those automatic sensors in bathrooms work really well for light-skinned people, but not dark-skinned people That seems like a bad thing. We want our things to work for everyone There's not enough corporate support like we could fix that or at least try to You know, I'm very thankful that red hat provides the funding to the Fedora project that it does I would love to for red hat to provide more. I can find lots of ways to spend Shadow Man's money You know companies like Amazon have just made a bajillion dollars off largely off the backs of things like Zen and Linux and All these other open source projects and they do give back like I don't don't get me wrong They have a pretty large open source team. They contribute financially. They contribute code Do they contribute in proportion to what they've the value they've gotten from it? Probably not and We're really bad about educating the users about why this stuff is important in the first place We can't just go in and you know scream at people and say you're not using free software It's terrible. Why don't you do that? Don't you like your freedoms? you have to meet people where they are and I think a lot of times we focus very much on the philosophical aspects and People don't care about other people's philosophy like they want to know what's practical and You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink You can lead a user to free software, but you can't make them. I don't know I haven't really thought that analogy through all the way So There's lots of places we could go We've come very far in the last 10 20 30 years and so now it's time to think about at the beginning of the decade What's next? What's gonna be what we as a community and I hate to say a community as a large group of many different communities What do we do now where do we go from here and I have about a minute and a half so I'll just remind you of the places you can provide feedback and If you have so since I spent all the time asking questions normally they say don't Ask you know ask questions when you're in the audience. Don't come up and give comments. We'll flip that around I'll let you come up and give a comment. So we have like time for one maybe two comments. Oh No, nobody was paying attention the whole time Okay, well, thank you everyone and I will see you at the pasta truck