 Hello everyone, thank you. Today I want to talk about carbon, automobiles, bebop, and fashion, and I'll add optimism to that. Right now I'm extremely excited actually about where open source software is taking us. So if we look at the history, in the 50s and 60s, if you bought one of the first commercially available computers, it came with the source code of the software that was running on it. So you could go in and modify it to meet your needs or to fix bugs. And so there was kind of this like open collaboration that happened amongst some of the early adopters. As we got into the 60s and 70s, the complexity of software started to increase, the cost of producing that increased. And so you saw people start to apply intellectual property protections to constrain what people could do with that software or even avoiding distributing the source code altogether. So this is the environment that in the 80s, the free software movement rose up to fight. It was this lack of freedom or this constraint. And so since the 80s, from the 80s into the 90s, we then saw the rise of this idea of free software. In 91 we had the release of probably still the most popular free software project to date, which is the Linux kernel. And then that then led to basically some of the foundations of the internet. So we had the Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP as a programming language. And then eventually by the end of the 90s we had the Netscape web browser. So it was pretty clear by the time we got to the end of the 90s that there was significant value in this idea of free software. The free software community was moving almost as fast as the much larger proprietary software industry at that point. However there was some confusion around the term free software and so the idea of open source was proposed and quickly received adoption. And so in the last 15 years now we've seen this massive uptake of open source software. I challenge you to find a software company in the world today that's not built on open source at some layer. Either the operating system that it runs on, the programming language that it's written in or the libraries that it uses. So that's where we are today. And the reason that I'm so optimistic is this model is proving to work and is changing the way that we build software. Even Microsoft who in the 90s was one of the biggest opponents of this idea of open source said open source is probably one of the most energizing projects our team has been working on. This is as they were open sourcing.net which is their core development platform. There I think they're about a third of the way or two thirds of the way through it right now and they're hoping by the end of the year to have the entire platform open source. So my question today is given this current state that we're in, what happens next? The open sharing of information predates computers in the internet. I think we like to think that we're experiencing something new but there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from the things that came before us. And so first I wanna start talking about carbon. So the term carbon based life form is actually redundant because all known life forms right now are carbon based. And there's a good chance that if life exists somewhere else in the universe it will probably be carbon based. Although you can't make that claim because scientists will call you a carbon chauvinist. But given the properties of carbon and all of the other elements there's a pretty good chance that the conditions don't exist for any other element to be suitable for life. So what makes carbon so suitable is it has these four electrons in its outer shell that it's willing to share with other elements and it prefers to have eight. So carbon will go and form bonds with things like hydrogen and it'll share its four electrons with hydrogen and in exchange hydrogen will share its electrons. So then you see carbon starting to build these extremely complex molecules and due to its desire to have eight electrons and have four to offer it can bond with an incredible number of elements. So there's currently 10 million I think known compounds of carbon and that's a small fraction of the number that are theoretically possible. So in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From Stephen Johnson calls this a stacked platform. So carbon will bond with each of these elements and create increasingly more and more complicated structures but each level of this platform doesn't have to worry about the layers underneath it. So when you are going for a run you don't have to know about the fact that your body metabolizes carbohydrates or how that works. When you're trying to think of your latest idea you don't have to think about the way that your brain transfers neurons and where these ideas come from. Each level of this platform has built us up to the point where the only thing we have to think about is the next problem that we're trying to solve. So software is inherently suitable for building platforms in the same way that carbon is. We solve a problem, we put it into code and we can repeatedly execute the solution to that problem over and over and we can also combine the solution with other solutions to solve problems that we hadn't even thought of before. So my question after we talk about carbon is well what happens then when we create these open platforms? We have a good idea based on our existence what happens when you combine carbon with other things and give it some time. What happens when we do this with software? So that takes us to automobiles. So if you were working in a startup in the early 1900s you would be probably working on the most exciting technology of the time which was popularizing the automobile. But you'd wake up one morning and find this posted on TechCrunch. Notice to the user's agents, importers, dealers and manufacturers of gasoline automobiles. United States patent whatever to George Selden controls broadly all gasoline automobiles which are accepted as commercially practical. Licenses under this patent have been secured from the owners by the following named manufacturers. And it goes on to list a bunch of them. The end of that goes on then to explain how these manufacturers are the ones that are advancing the current state of technology. And they are the ones responsible for the development of this automobile. And then it goes on to threaten that if you are not one of these licensed manufacturers we will file a lawsuit against you and it lists out the lawsuits that have been filed to date. So here's the patent. This is for the road vehicle which in my opinion looks a lot like a horse carriage with a gasoline engine on it. And neither of those were new inventions. The gasoline engine had been around for 50 years. Horse carriages have been around for eternity, almost I think since the beginning of time at least. But so there's nothing new about this except that it was taking existing elements and combining them and then using these ideas of intellectual property to add restrictions. Well 1902 this guy came around Henry Ford and he applied for a license for this patent and was rejected because of past business failings which is extremely ironic because I think every other name on the list of people that were licensed are no longer in business. So Henry Ford was rejected for this patent and then goes on and decides to build an automobile anyway. So by 1905-ish the association that owned the patent filed suit against Henry Ford there's this long drawn out battle. And finally in 1911 Henry Ford wins an appeal and the patent is overturned. During these proceedings Henry Ford says this, it's perfectly safe to say that George Selden has never advanced the automobile industry in a single particular and it would perhaps be further advanced than it is now if he had never been born. You think hacker news comments are bad. So Ford then was instrumental in creating shortly after that this group called the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association which is this cross licensing basically patent pool where anybody could join and get access to all of the patents on the condition that you contributed all of yours back. So it was just completely free and open group. There was no cost to acquire the patents. All you had to do was participate in those comments. And what we see happening pretty much immediately after, here's the number of automobiles produced in the US. The red line is 1911 when the patent was overturned and the cross licensing agreement was formed. So in the first four years you see all of a sudden this explosion of automobiles being produced and then if you look at the next 15 years despite World War I and the crash of the stack market you still see exponential growth. In the book where good ideas come from Stephen Johnson says the long zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may in the end be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms. So by deciding to pool all of their best ideas together the auto industry opted into this idea of instead of competing with each other let's create an entirely new industry that didn't exist before. Let's build the infrastructure for it. You know and let's work on solving new ideas instead of spending our time reinventing the wheel. This is what I think we're doing with open source. We're opting into this idea of openness where we take our best solutions and we give them out to the community so that other people can use them and combine them in interesting ways to solve new problems. Even Microsoft, their new CEO Satya Nadala, Nadela, excuse me, I don't know why I struggle with that. Even Microsoft says I don't want to fight old battles I want to fight new ones. They have been adopting Linux as part of their Azure cloud platform and they're releasing open source as fast as they can on GitHub. Even this guy, Iron Man, I mean Elon Musk is working on changing the auto industry again by licensing all of Tesla's patents for anybody to use so that he can create an electric vehicle industry. So in the announcement that they made, now announcing that they were giving all their patents out he said we believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars and the world would all benefit from a common rapidly evolving technology platform. He then goes on to say technology leadership is not defined by patents which history is repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world's most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla's position in this regard. So by opting into this openness we're building this open platform. And so what happens once we've built that platform when every new company builds on top of that platform? And for that I wanna talk about Bebop. So Bebop is this style of jazz that evolved about 50 years in to the evolution of jazz. And jazz is this extremely complex layered stacked platform just like software, just like automobiles. You know it was built on kind of these original African rhythms combined with European harmonic accompaniment. And then you have all these surplus of instruments from post-Civil War United States all show up in New Orleans and these musicians that have no idea what they're doing get their hands on these tools and these cultural genres and start to combine them in really interesting ways. And jazz is like inherently this extremely competitive form of music. So you get together in these jam sessions and improvise and the idea of improvisation is you do something that nobody else has done before or you play a sound that people have not heard. And so these jazz musicians would try and play in this style and then once they came up with something new somebody would try and imitate them. Well, in the 40s when Charlie Parker and several other folks were getting together for these jam sessions, Charlie started playing in this style that became known as Bebop. And there's an anecdote that says that the reason he played like that was he didn't think anyone else could play that way. He thought he was the only one that could do it. Well, the problem for Charlie is that he was building on top of this completely open platform. Anybody else that had time and access to the instruments and the cultural background that he had could easily imitate him. So at this point, when you and I think of jazz the style that we actually think of is Bebop because eventually people did figure out how to imitate him. And I think that this is happening in software right now even the most innovative companies. So you think of Apple as maybe the example. Even Apple is not that far ahead of everyone else. They're building on the same platform that we all have access to. And they might be doing really interesting things but it's not that hard to look at what they're doing and copy it. And so within a few years, the things that Apple are doing, everyone else will have as our base platform that we can then build on using open technologies. So the question then comes up, what happens when all of us are building on these open platforms and openness prevails? Is this a race to the bottom? And for that I want to talk about fashion. So as you can tell from my beautiful programming attire, I am very intimate with the fashion industry. This is not true at all. I don't nothing about fashion. So in the US at least, the courts have ruled that apparel is too utilitarian for copyright protection. So this means that not only is copying or excuse me, not only is it allowed, it's actually encouraged. People copy each other all the time. So this means that any fashion designer can look back through history and find any style, produce a garment of that and release it as their own invention. It doesn't matter who they knocked it off from, who they sampled from, who they took their ideas from. In her incredible TED talk, Johanna Blakely lays out the effect that this has had on the fashion industry. She says that this culture of copying has created this like open ecology of creativity where everybody's trying to innovate and one up each other and there's incredible pace in the fashion industry. I mean, think about the establishment of global trends. Like a new fancy bag comes out or a new garment and within weeks or months, there's knockoffs of it everywhere. And so the fashion cycle is just extremely quick. And you would think, okay, well maybe this is a race to the bottom then. Like if everything I do, somebody can copy, how am I gonna make money? But in her talk, Johanna presents this chart which on the left, we have low IP industries. So industries with low intellectual property protection. So that's food, you can't copyright or patent a recipe. You have automobiles, you have fashion, you have furniture. On the right, you have high IP industries. So films, books, music. This is just an incredible difference of the things that what this culture of copying can bring to us when we're all constantly adding to this foundation that the next generation can build on. And so even in the fashion industry, like if you wanna be ahead, if you wanna be on the cutting edge, you're either innovating or you're curating these ideas from the past. But if you don't wanna participate in that, there's plenty of other room for you in the fashion industry. So they have what they call fast fashion which is this knockoff culture of, somebody produces a new garment, I'm gonna go copy it, I'm gonna sell it in Forever 21 and I'm gonna get rich. So there's plenty of money for people to be made no matter what your stick is. So Mark Andreessen has this idea that software is eating the world. And this is where I think things get really interesting. The idea is that at some point, every industry is gonna be a software industry. You can't start a business right now without building it on software. The government can't operate without software. You can't farm without software. You can't raise sheep without software which is incredible. So the question then that I wanna leave you with is what happens when every industry is built on this open fast moving platform of open source? Thank you very much.