 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Hello everyone, welcome back to our special CUBE live coverage of Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America. Here in LA, I'm John Furrier, co-host with Stu Miniman, our next guest is Christine Corbett, Moran PhD at Astronomy, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. That's right, it's mouthful. Welcome to theCUBE, mouthful, but you're also keynoting, gave one of the talks, opening date today after Jim Zemlin, on tech and culture and politics. That's right, yeah. Which I thought was fantastic, a lot of great notes there. Connect the dots for us, metaphorically speaking, between Caltech and tech and culture and open source. What was, why did you take that theme? Sure, so I've been involved in programming since I was an undergraduate in college, I studied computer science, and always attending more and more conferences, hacker cons, security conferences, that sort of stuff. Very early on, what attracted me to technology was not just the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of being able to solve a hard technical problem. That was a lot of fun, but also the impact that it could have. So even as I went on a very academic track, I continued to make open source contributions, really seeking that kind of cultural impact, and it wasn't something that I was real vocal about, talking about, more talking about the technology side of things than the politics side of things. But in the past few years, I think with the rise of fake news, with the rise of various sorts of societal problems that were seen as a consequence of technology, I decided I was gonna try to speak more to that end of things so that we can focus on that as a technology community on what are we gonna do with this enormous power that we have. And we'll get into that a couple of direct questions for you. It was an awesome, awesome talk. You get a lot in there. You're riffing some good stuff there with Jim as well. But you had made a comment that you originally wanted to be a lawyer, went to MIT, and you started, you got pulled in to the dark side. That's right. And programming. As a former computer science myself, it's like, what got the bug? Take us through that moment. What was that? Was it just you started coding and damn, I love coding? What was the moment? Sure. I was always talented in math and science and that was part of the reason why I was admitted to MIT and chose to go there. My late father was a lawyer. I didn't really have an example of a technologist in my life. So to me, career-wise, I was gonna be a lawyer but I was interested in technology. What kind of lawyer is that? Patent attorney. So that was my career path. MIT, some sort of engineering, then a patent attorney. I got to MIT and realized I didn't have to be an attorney. I could just do the fun stuff. For some people, that's the fun part. For me, it ended up being when I took my first computer science class, something that was fun, that I was good at and that I really got addicted to kind of the feedback loop of you always have a problem you're trying to solve, it doesn't work, it doesn't work and then you get it to work and then it's great for a minute and then there's a new problem to solve. That's a great story and I think it was very inspirational. A lot of folks watching will be inspired by that. But the other thing that inspired me in the keynote was your comment about code and culture. And I love this notion that code is now at a point when open source is a global phenomenon. You mentioned Earth and space. It's involved in some of the space, it's all Linux space now. But code can shape culture. Explain what you mean by that because I think this is one of those things that people might not see happening right now but it is happening. You're starting to see the more inclusionary roles and the communities are changing and code is not just the tech thing. Explain what you mean by code shaping culture. Well, we can already see that in terms of changing corporate culture. So for example, 10 or 15, 20 years ago, it might be inconceivable to make contributions that might benefit your corporate competitor. And we all have corporate competitors whether that's a nation, the US having competitors, whether that's your local sports rivalry. We all have competitors but open source has really shown that you're relying on things that you as a group, no matter what entity you are, you can't do as much as you can if you share your contributions and benefit from people around the globe. So that's one big way that I've seen corporate culture and just everyday culture change that people have recognized that whether it's science or corporate success, you can't do it alone. There's no lone genius. You really have to do it as a community. As a collective too. And you mentioned some of the ruling class and you're kind of referring to not ruling class and open source, but also politics and that gerrymandering was the word you use. We don't hear that often in conferences but the idea of having more people exposed creates more data. Talk about what you mean by that because this is interesting and more, this truly is a democratization opportunity. Absolutely. Yet, if not handled properly, could go away. Yeah, I think I am a little, I don't know if there's any Game of Thrones fans out there but you know, at some point this season and previous seasons, Daenerys Targaryen is there and they're like, well if you do this, you're gonna be the same evil person, just new face. And I think there's a risk of that in the open source community that if it ends up just being a few people, it's the same oligarchy, the same sort of corruption, just a different face to it. And I don't think open source will go that way. Just based on the people that I've met in the community, but it is something that we have to actively guard against and make sure that we have as many people contributing to open source so that it's not just a few people who are capable of changing the world and have the power to decide whether it's going to be A or B but as many people as possible. Christine, the kind of monetization of open source is always an interesting topic at these kind of shows. You had an interesting piece talking about young people contributing, contributing to open source. It's not just, oh yeah, do it for free and expect them to do it. Same thing in academia a lot of times. It's like, oh, hey, yeah, you're going to do that research and participate and write papers and money's got to come somewhere to help fund this. How does kind of the money fit into this whole discussion of open source? So I think that that's been one of the big successes of open source. And we heard that from Jim as well today that it isn't some sort of unattainable in terms of achieving value for society. When you do something of value, money is a reward for that. And the only question is how to distribute that reward effectively to the community. What I see sometimes in the community is there's this myth of everyone in open source getting involved for just the fun of it. And there's a huge amount of that. I have done a bunch of contributions for free on the side but I've always in the end gotten some sort of monetary reward for that down the line and someone talked today about that makes you more employable, et cetera. And that has left me with the time and the freedom to continue that development. And I think it's a risk as a young person who is going into debt for college to not realize that that monetary reward will come or have it be so out of sync with their current life situation that they're unable to give the time to develop the skills. So I don't think that money is a primary motivating factor for most people in the community but certainly as Linus said today as well, when you don't have to worry about money, that's when you do the really cool, nitty gritty things that might be a risk that then grow to be that next big project. It's interesting comedy made about the U.S. that he couldn't do potentially Linux if he was in the U.S. It opens up your eyes to say, hmm, we got to do better. And so that brings up the whole notion of the radical comment of open source has always been kind of a radical. And then when I was growing up it was a tier two alternative to the big guys. Now it's tier one. And I think the stakes are higher and the thing that I'd like to get your comment that we actually do is how does the community take it to the next level when it's bigger than the United States? You have China saying no more ICOs, no more virtual currencies, that's a potential issue is a data point of many other things that could be on the global scale. Security, the equifax, fax, hack, identity theft. Truth in communities is now an issue. And there's more projects more than ever. So I made a comment on Twitter, whose shoulders do we stand on in the expression of standing on the shoulders before you? Yeah, you're standing on a C. So there's a discovery challenge and what do we do? How do you get to the truth? What's your thoughts on that? That is a large question. I don't know if I can answer it in a short amount of time. So to break it down a little bit, one of the issues is that we're in this global society and we have different portions trying to regulate what's next in technology. For example, China with the ICOs, et cetera. One of the phrases I used in my talk was that the math is on the people's side. And I think it is the case still with a lot of the technologies that are distributed. It's very hard for one particular government or nation state to say, hey, this is, we're going to put this back in the box. It's Pandora's box, it's out in the open. So that's a challenge as well for China and for other people, the US, if you have some harmful scenario, how to actually regulate that. I don't know how that's going to work out moving forward. I think it is the case in our community how to go to the next level, which is another point that you brought up. One thing that Linus also brought up today that kind of is one of the reasons why it's great to collaborate with corporations is that often they put kind of the finishing touches on a product to really make it to the level that people can engage with it easily. That kind of on ramping to new technology is very easy. And that's because a corporation is very incentivized monetarily to do that. Whereas the open source community isn't necessarily incentivized to do that. Moreover, a lot of that work, that final 1% of a project for the polish is so much more difficult. It's not the fun technical element. So a lot of the open source contributors, myself included, aren't necessarily very excited about that. However, what we saw in Signal, which is a product that I've, it is a nonprofit, it is something that isn't necessarily for corporate gain, but that final polish and making it very usable didn't mean that a lot more people are using the product. So in terms of we as a community, I think we have to figure out how keeping our radical governance structure, how to get more and more projects to have that final polish. And that'll really take the whole community to the next level. And let them benefit from it in a way that they're comfortable with. Now it's not a proprietary lock-in. It's more of only 10% of most of the applications are uniquely differentiated thanks for open source. Question, kind of take a thought experiment or just a philosophical question. Obviously astronomy and astrophysics is an interesting background. You got a world of connected devices. The IOT, the Internet of Things includes people. So, you know, I'm sitting there looking at the stars. Oh, that's the Apache project. A lot of stars in that one. You have these constellations of communities if you will out there to kind of use the metaphor. And then you got astrophysics. You got the Milky Way, a lot of gravity around there. You almost take a metaphor, talks to how communities work. So let's get your thoughts. How does astrophysics and astronomy relate to some of the dynamics in how self-governing things work? I'd love to see that visualization, by the way, of the Apache project and the Milky Way. Which was the big dipper. That sounds gorgeous. You guys should definitely do that. John, you're going to find something at Caltech. You know, our next fellowship. They'll argue I was the big dipper or not, but you know. I think some of the challenges are similar. In the sciences in that, you know, people initially get into it because it's something they're curious about. It's something that they love. And that's an innate human instinct. People have always gazed up at the stars. People have always wondered how things work, how your computer works. You know, let me figure that out. That said, ultimately they need to eat and feed their families and that sort of stuff. And we often see in the astrophysics community incredibly talented people at some stage in their career leaving for some sort of corporate job. And retaining talent is difficult because a lot of people are forced to move around the globe to different centers in academia. And that lifestyle can be difficult. The pay often isn't as rewarding as it could be. So to make some sort of parallel between that community and the open source community, retaining talent in open source, if you want people to not necessarily work in open source under Microsoft, under, you know, certain corporation only, but to kind of work more generally. That's something that ultimately we have to distribute the rewards from that to the community. It's kind of interesting. I always thought Stu was interesting in the role of the corporation in open source. Always was trying to change the game. You know, you mentioned gerrymandering. The old model was, oh, we got to influence slow that down, slow that down so we can control it. Yeah, so John, we've had people from around the globe and even that have made it to space on theCUBE before. I don't know that we've ever had anybody that's been to the South Pole before on theCUBE. So Christine, maybe tell us a little bit about, you know, how's technology, you know, working in the South Pole and what can you tell our audience about it? Sure, so I spent 10 and a half months at the South Pole, not just Antarctica, but literally the middle of the continent, the geographic South Pole. There the US has a research base that houses up to about 200 people during the austral summer months when it's warm, that is maybe minus 20 degrees or so. During the cold winter months, it gets completely dark and planes have a very difficult time coming in and out. So they close off the station to a skeleton crew to keep the science experiments down there running. There are several astrophysical experiments, several telescopes as well as many research projects and that skeleton crew was what I was a part of, 46 people and I was tasked with running a telescope down there looking at some of the echoes of the Big Bang and I was basically a telescope doctor. So I was on call much like a sys admin might be. I was responsible for the kind of IT support for the telescope but also just physical, something physically broke, kind of replacing that and that meant I could be woken up in the middle of the night because of some kind of package update issue or anything like that and I'd have to hike out in minus 100 degrees to fix this sometimes. Oftentimes there was IT support on the station so we did have internet running to the telescope which was about a kilometer away. It took me anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to walk out there. So if it didn't require onsite support sometimes I could do the work in my pajamas to kind of fix that. So it was a kind of traditional computer support role in a very untraditional environment. That's an IoT device, isn't it? Yeah. Stu and I are always interested in the younger generation as we have both had, you know, kids who are growing up in this new digital culture. Well, what's your feeling in terms of the younger generation that are coming up because people going to school now digital natives. Of course, where online isn't always the answer. People learn differently. Your thoughts on onboard in the younger generation and for the inclusion piece which is super important whether it's women in tech and or just people getting more people into computer science. What are some of the things that you see happen that excite you? And what are some of the things that get you concerned? Yeah, so I had the chance, I mentioned it a little in my talk, to teach 12 high school students how to computer program this summer. Some of them had been through computer programming classes at their colleges or at their high schools, some not. What I saw when I was in high school was a huge variety of confidence in the high school teachers that I had. Some were amazing and inspiring others because in the U.S. you need a degree in education but not necessarily a degree in the field that you're teaching. I think that there's a huge lack of people capable of teaching the next generation who are working at the high school level. It's not that there's a huge lack of people who are capable. Kind of almost anyone at this conference could sit down and help a high schooler get motivated in self study. So I think teacher training is something that I'm concerned about. In terms of things that I'm very excited about, we're not quite there yet with the online courses but the ability to acquire that knowledge online is very, very exciting. In addition, I think we're waking up as a society to the fact that four year college isn't necessarily the best preparation for every single field. For some fields, it's very useful. For other fields, particularly engineering, maybe even computer science and engineering, apprenticeships or practical experience could be as valuable if not more valuable for less expense. So I'm excited about new initiatives, these coding boot camps. I think there's a difficulty in regulation in that you don't know for a new coding boot camp is it just trying to get people's money? Is it really going to help their careers? So we're in a very frothy time there but I think ultimately how it will shake out is it's going to help people enter technology jobs quicker. And there's a percentage of jobs that aren't even invented yet. So is AI and you see self-driving cars and these things are easy indicators that hey, society's changing. Yeah, and it's also going to be helpful for professionals like us, older professionals who want to keep up in this ever-growing field and it's not, I don't necessarily want to go back for a second PhD but I'll absolutely take an online course and something that I didn't see in my undergrad. I mean, you can get immersed in anything these days online. It's great and there's a lot of community behind it. Christine, thanks so much for sharing. Congratulations on a great keynote. Thanks for spending some time on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. It's theCUBE live coverage here in LA for Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.