 Hi, this is Osopil Bharti and we are here at Open Source Summit in Vancouver and today we have with us Amanda Brock, CEO and founder of Open UK. Amanda, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you very much for having me along. Yeah, I would of course love to talk about Open UK, what it is and of course your own open source journey, why you started. So let's start with Open UK. What is it? Okay, so Open UK is an unusual organization. We are the industry organization for open technology for the UK and that's open source software, open hardware and open data. Now we sort of broke the mold in that we focus on people. We are about the business of open technology but we focus on individuals in our geographic location. We don't care if they work for UK companies, international companies, homegrown companies, you know, it doesn't really matter. We focus on the individual and the fact that they're in the UK, whoever they work for and the companies follow along behind and what that's meant is that we've brought together the most incredible group of people who are leadership across the UK and open technology. It's just been a phenomenal experience and we operate on three pillars. So community, that leadership community, I've just talked to you about legal and policy, taking their voice, their collective voice and having impact on laws and policies in the UK and then learning, building the skills for the future. You talked about, you know, first of all hardware, software and other things but you said your focus is more on people. Absolutely. So what I want to talk about because when we look at, you know, any technology or if you talk about open source in general, mostly, you know, you have geeks who love to talk about code but the fact is that open source is actually less about code, it's about collaboration. Absolutely. And sometimes, you know, if you look at people who have created projects, they may not be very good communicator, you know, they are like introverts, they just created a code but their projects are being used by millions of users. So I want to talk to you about the people or human aspect of code and open source. What was, you know, what kind of initiated that, hey, let's put focus on people. First of all, my background is that I'm a lawyer, right? I was a lawyer for 25 years. I haven't been a lawyer for the last five and I've been working for Open UK for most of those. So for me, tech was about IP and relationships, about individuals and their relationships with each other. So if you create a piece of code and nobody comes along and uses that code, there's not much point, right? And we see particularly as we watch things like government start to use open source software, their initial policy is always to save costs, without exception. They want to avoid lock-in, they want to create code that's recycled and reused. The problem is that if you simply create code and put it on GitHub, nobody's ever going to come along and use it, right? So you have to be able to communicate to others. You have to build a community around it. You have to have collaboration, contributions, and then all sorts of things that you might not get from a software engineer like documentation, like training, like skills development that happens when other people come into your community. So we see this whole ecosystem of people around the code and for me they are more important because they're what creates the code. The code does not dictate them. It's the other way around for me. So that's really where we came from. Right. One more aspect of open source is not in addition to people aspect is also it has to be sustainable as well. Absolutely. If just one person writing the code in a free time or if a company contribute or donate a code or a charity is not going to be sustainable. So how do you also ensure that the folks are not doing charity as I'm contributing to open source but it's tied to their own because today even if you look at Linux Foundation reports, a lot of developers today are on the payroll of big companies. It's not the moonlight as a developer at night and do something else today. So talk about the sustainability point. That's an interesting question, right? So there is some pushback on that. So we don't currently demonstrate well whether individuals are contributing as part of their company role or in their own time as they're themselves off their own back. So I've mentioned that I was a lawyer. I worked for a company called Canonical for five years and I set up the legal team there and one of the things we did was look at our employment contracts to give people the ability to contribute in their own time and that's something even today 15 years later that companies are often still working on is to allow their employees to do their own thing and you have to think how do you differentiate what that individual is doing in the course of their work and what are they doing off their own back, right? So we used to work on the basis that if your manager had asked you to do something you were doing it for the company and if you were just going in you know tinkering with a project or making your own contributions that was your thing and that differentiation is hard to make and we don't have good statistics around it. So when we look at GitHub we can't really analyze when people contribute which basis they're doing it on and Open UK does a lot of research and reporting. We are about to do our next survey starts next Tuesday which I think is the 16th, 17th of May and then we will do reporting around that and we focus a lot on the economics and understanding these things but as we go year on year we get further into some of these questions and understanding more about why the developers contribute when they contribute. So Jim was talking this morning in his keynote about the fact that we see open source increase when there's a recession but somebody else was pointing out to me that's because a lot of the developers who are unemployed have time to make contributions so we don't track whether they're doing it you know in the course of their work are you actively employed at the moment. I absolutely agree with you however though most of the developers we've seen contribute their contributions effectively become their CV and they've become people who are highly employable and in the last decade really sought after and it's probably no better way to show an employer your skills as an engineer than to be doing open source. And since you mentioned canonical if you can remember the early days of canonical canonical kind of created a kind of you know whole business for all the deviant developers you know most of them become open to developers most of them became canonical employees so that you know a lot of deviant developers you know so and you know a lot of these open source companies so that's what I was talking about the sustainability is very important also I think that as we move further in our lives when we're college students we have a lot of free time when we get married then we have kids and then you have to bills to pay and then you have less time so even today when we look at the whole cloud native land escape order a lot of folks they are on the company and whatever the work work they're doing is you know so yes but the challenge is that it becomes hard to track and the whole model of open source is also not much about tracking people use different handles. It's interesting yeah so it's one of the things you may have noticed with Ubuntu and this was a conscious decision that we didn't at least then ever have anybody registered to use it so we couldn't prove how many users we had which we needed in certain circumstances because it was antithetical it was against the grain of what we we did now developers had come out of the Debian movement you know Ubuntu was based on that so it was really important to them and I think that that point that you make though about the shift so 15 years ago a lot of people contributing were doing it in their own time and they were in roles where their day job was proprietary engineering and in the last five 10 years that shifted so you know developers who have cut their teeth on open source who demonstrate a good history in that space and have these very cutting-edge innovative skills particularly today with things like languages like our Rust you know and when we start to see things like memory safety being talked about by the White House then you're starting to see an open source language that is low in terms of its energy consumption which is more secure in terms of memory safety than a lot of things that we're looking at so you know you are really seeing open source come to the fore and therefore you are seeing more and more people who started life contributing maybe when they're in high school maybe as a hobbyist but those people now working in it I want to talk about you know you earlier mentioned about government when we look at Europe you know I'm looking at Europe in general you know I'm not you know political but open source Linux kernel it came from Europe you know and there is a big huge community of kernel developers in Europe a lot of projects culturally Europe is totally different than the US you know a lot of folks get involved there a lot of contribution comes out a lot of adoption if you look at the whole Munich you know project with the you know Linux adoption there so a lot of you know grass level movement is there but we don't see a lot of companies coming and releasing their open source code so what I want to understand from you when you look at the European space yeah when you can a lot of government policies which are like but sometimes the policies are like not very well so the thing is the lawmakers they may want open source but they don't understand open source so what kind of challenges you see in Europe when it comes to talking with the government entities to embrace open source in the right manner you've talked about two different things so there is the piece around scale ups right and I can't really speak for the rest of you when we look at Europe the UK is number one in open source Germany's behind it and France a long way behind Germany they're growing faster than the UK is but we are aware and earlier this year we hit three million GitHub accounts now that's four and a half percent of the UK population and that's more than any country in the world India's got about nine million way more than ours but per capita much less so we have this really strong grassroots movement in the UK as well as a lot of leadership and what I see there you know as opposed to the rest of Europe is that we are seeing startup start to scale in the UK we've got SNCC we've got we've worked jet stack you know a bunch of companies that are coming through however historically we didn't have them and I think there's a couple of reasons one is around skills so we have great engineers but we lack some of the other skills around business commercialization so we are actively working on educating people in that space to bring those skills to the UK the other thing that we we're not so good at is risk right we don't like failure failure is embarrassing if you're British you know it's a bit frowned upon so we need more of that sort of hoots burn attitude and risk tolerance that you get particularly in the Bay Area for our startups to grow and the third thing we need is funding on decent terms from people who understand open and open source if you wanted to grow and they're not dissimilar to what you need for a proprietary companies to scale more and we are seeing the UK with more unicorns now than the whole of the rest of Europe you know they're very proud of that so you know the the government want us to be the next Silicon Valley and to do that they're going to have to get a better understanding of open source because I think everybody here understands it's the future of innovation so there's that piece about business then separately government you know what does government have to understand well I don't know if you've been in the open SSF room today but they had a lady speaking from the White House who also spoke at Open UK's conference in February and she's talking again about digitalization she's talking about the fact that all companies are using software now which means they're using open source so they've got to start to understand it but governments the public sector our infrastructure and our national critical infrastructure today is built on open source software and you've got a lot of the people who are working on that who haven't really understood the ways to do it how to do it you know the best way possible so there's a big educational piece there and there's a piece around security and governments have never been more concerned about bad actors and nation states than they are today so we see the White House drive that conversation you know really on a security level but that will I think evolve into the broader curation conversation that we heard Eric Brewer talking about this morning you know making sure that we don't just have good technical hygiene but good governance as well as security as we came out of lockdown in the UK we hosted COP26 and that really focused people in the UK on sustainability not sustainability in the way we were talking about it before for engineering but sustainability and an environmental landscape and the sustainable development goals from the UN and we actually held our first big event at COP26 which allowed Open UK to really participate in setting this sustainability agenda and I mentioned earlier you know Rust as a language uses less energy than many of the others and I think we will now see an increasing focus on that kind of thing I mean we created a blueprint for data centres we've done one for electric vehicle charging which look at the landscape and bring together the technologies and I think there's a natural there's a natural positioning for open source in that and I think we'll see it have a much more elevated status in the next few years in that sustainability agenda plus they want to learn to collaborate and there's nobody better to teach collaboration than the open source community what do you think is driving this you know when governments are looking at open source is it the commercial success of open source today also these foundations are playing a very big role in creating an event playing field around the project so vendors can contribute so talk about that I think it's inevitability so whilst you may not have these massive open source vendors there is a level so we have a bid out for about half a billion in the UK in healthcare right now and there is an alternative to the big vendor a consortium that's been put together and there are open source players and amongst that consortium so I think we are seeing challenges I think also infrastructure is built an open source the platform economy the cloud economy is built an open source and it doesn't really matter how you try and get around it it just is you know the impact that kubernetes cloud native open stack the impact they've all had has shifted the utilisation of open source now it's not always well understood that that's what's under there but I think there's a realisation today that your national infrastructure is sitting on top of that therefore we need it to be secure and well maintained and we need it to be well curated so I think there is a shift in understanding I think there is still probably more opening up to go on but even things like log for J shelf for J when we saw that vulnerability the companies that struggled most were the ones that had undisclosed open source right so this the work we're doing around the open source ecosystem and the open source governance and things like s bombs you know we used to create things like s bombs 15 years ago at canonical we had to our customers wanted to know what was in there they had been to distribution that was a standard practice so this is not new being adopted by federal government or required by federal government is new the the UK and Europe haven't quite gone down the same route and we're waiting for the UK legislation I suspect that they will follow suit and I think s bomb will be part of it but it won't be the key focus that it initially was in the US you know in 2021 with the executive order that was the thing now we're seeing a more holistic broader approach coming out of the US that I expect we'll see and then there's also been a great deal of pushback on what the EU is done I don't really want to be too critical of them but it hasn't gone well for them I'm thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about open UK and also share all those insights about where the industry is heading thanks for those and I would love to have you back on the show brilliant thank you very much for having me and I hope to join you again