 Good morning. So, thank you for having me. Part of the keynote is always doing a little bit of self-marketing. I'm an engineer, I'm a developer and I'm terrible at marketing, so let me get that out of the way first. I work for SUSE. I usually like to say we are the second biggest open source Linux vendor. We've been around for 20 plus years. We have been doing a lot of great stuff in the Linux kernel and in other projects. Linux mentioned SGI, Linux mentioned some of the memory management things that had to be fixed in the Linux kernel in 2.4. We continue to do nifty stuff like with kernel live patching and for me personally SUSE is an absolute great place to work for. Period. Thank you. Oh, by the way, one more thing. In case somebody talks to you, please remember we are not a part of Novel any longer. Okay. It's one of the mistakes people still make. We are an independent business unit in the bigger micro focus corporation. Good. With that, let me get to the presentation. Click. Click. This is how I first ran into Linux. 24 years ago I read about it in a magazine article and I said this is cool. I want to play with this. And there was this snail mail address of a guy somewhere in Germany. I sent him a box of 10 floppies. Two weeks later I got back a box with nine floppies, a boot disk, a root disk and seven disks of source code and an A4 sheet paper of printed instructions. I took all my courage and these floppies went to my computer which had a very expensive 100 megabyte hard drive, replaced Minix and never looked back. So it was great. Fast forward 25 years. This is where we are today and I'm not going to bore you with all the numbers. We dominate. The majority of devices shipped run Linux, mostly thanks to Android. Out of the top 1 million public web servers, a tiny fraction is not running Linux. The top 500 supercomputers, we completely dominate that space. Probably out of the computers running on Mars, 100% of them probably run Linux. At least those that mankind put there. And maybe some of the others too. So that's not what it looked like 24 years ago. Really everybody else was telling us you guys can't win, right? And they had a lot of good arguments. You program on stuff and nobody pays you for it. You know, you're going to starve. You get into flame wars with people on the other side of the planet about some, you know, nitty-gritty technical details. Come on, get a life. And actually one of my most favorite things is in 93, 94, I was at one of the very, very, very first Linux conferences in Amsterdam. And we were sitting together, several developers and a guy from one of the BSD core teams in a coffee shop. And he said, you know, from the outside this Linux thing looks just crazy. You've got this huge turmoil, patches flying around, people screaming at each other, and every once in a while a release pops out. Guys, you need more structure. You need a core team and hierarchy and whatever. And last but not least, all the commercial vendors said, haha, you're a toy, you'll never make it. Now the question is how did we get to where we are today and why did we do it? And I think number one is because we wanted to. We weren't particularly clueful. We were not the experts, but we wanted to do it. Back at the time, the majority or basically all operating systems out there, they were either inferior, they were extremely restrictive, or extremely expensive. And a lot of them were everything at once. The second thing is we had to. We were all in some way or other had been exposed to Unix. And we liked the principles on which it was operating. We liked the flexibility that it gave us as programmers and admins. But the Unix vendor landscape was everybody was at war with each other. They were suing each other over IP infringement. They were suing the BSDs for IP infringement. And they were just too busy with trying to kill each other to create anything new. So we had to go and do our own. And third, because we could. So this is my first internet connection. And sometimes in the night, in my dreams, I still hear the... Connect. It doesn't look like Pokemon Go, okay? But this is it. And I think part of the success that we have had is because we were riding this wave of technological change. Linux benefited enormously from the ability of real-time communication around the globe, or near real-time. And vice versa, the internet profited a lot from the development of Linux. Every other web server, or a huge number of web servers initially, they were all running on some sort of Linux put together in the back room of some university, or some data center, you know. And we both grew together. So this is one of the reasons why we are here today. And the fourth one, and Linux stole a bit of my thunder here, is because of a guy like this. I believe the reason we have been so successful is because we keep sharing our DNA. If you look at distributions today, 90 plus percent of the code that we ship is the same. Different versions, but from the same project. So we share all that. If you're in the software industry, there's always this little temptation to try to get a head start by differentiating on the code side. By adding your own little secret sauce, you may get one, two years of head start over the competition. If you start patenting stuff, yeah, even four years, there's always this temptation. I talked about this the other day. This has not happened in Linux. And I believe one of the major reasons why that has not happened is because of the GPL license, because it is a free license. So you can have your own special sauce, but it's not secret. You have to put the recipe out in the open. And the people can see that. And if they like it, they will take it and put it in the code. And if they're mad at you, they will do it in a way so that it's absolutely useless to you. If they don't pick it up, then you also know it's been a crappy idea to begin with. And it is an ongoing revolution. We've heard about this a couple of times during the past couple of days. Linux has put open source on the map. We haven't invented it, definitely not. But what we have shown is that it is a viable development model. It is increasing. Adoption of open source is increasing. It is a revolution. But one thing of one note of caveat, just because something is a revolution doesn't mean it will become better all the time. So if you look out into the real world, things don't automatically get better. They need work. Now, I talked about 25 years ago how Linux was writing this big wave called the Internet. It's my impression that we are in a similar situation today. So I'm seeing new open source projects spring up like crazy. Many of them solving the same issue, the same problem in slightly different ways. They come up at incredible speed. They attract a huge number of developers. Some of them died just as quickly as they came. So it is evolution in fast forward. There's a huge change going on, right? And I'm not good at creating buzzwords. This wave goes by many names. I haven't found a great name yet. But part of that is things like big data analytics, Internet of Things, software defined infrastructure. And we, and that's, I think it includes most people here at this conference, and also us, Susa, as a vendor, I think the part that we're most interested in is the software defined infrastructure. And that includes virtualization of computing, virtualization of networking, virtualization of storage. And the interesting, the most interesting project that have sprung up in this area, we all know them. It's like OpenStack Cloud. It's like Chef Storage. Things like that, right? They're absolutely attractive. And this is where I believe actually the next wave of change is going with these projects. And that's why we, as Susa, are also very interested in being there and participating and contributing. But just like we made Linux successful, is I believe we rely on the same things that have made Linux such a success. Sharing the effort. We develop things together. It's not like somebody in some corner has a great idea, brings it to perfection and then throws it out. Closed source, one of the biggest issue with closed source that we see today in this massive change is closed source does not scale well enough. You can only attract the talent and the capacity for this huge change if you go open source. So there is an economic aspect to it. The second thing that we rely on is sharing the code. So it's not the same as sharing the effort. It's sharing the code. Make it available to everybody. Make it available so that everybody can run a business on it. And last but not least, share the rights to it. And this goes back to the licensing thing. And what Linux mentioned about attracting people, if you're a developer, if I'm a developer, I pick a project where I know I can have an influence, where I can actually rest and sleep peacefully knowing that nobody's taking advantage of me, that the code that I contribute, that my lifetime that I invest into that project is actually going to be of benefit, not just to some corporation over there, but to me as well, and I can influence the direction in which this goes. Now, the GPL is not for everybody, right? A lot of people have issues with it. And that's okay. If you write the code, if you create the project, it's your choice. The license is your choice. The point I'm trying to make is I believe it is important to think about the governance of projects and how we ensure that the rights to the code are always shared. And the GPL is one way of doing it. It's definitely not the only one. But I believe, going forward, if we want to continue on the trajectory that we're on, this is going to be a very important aspect, the freedom of the software that we rely on. Now, looking at the next 25 years, I'll be careful about that. Nothing ages more quickly and less gracefully than bold predictions. And I'm not talking about desktop. And by the way, I completely disagree with the statement here, but that is for a different day and a different presentation. Let me close by looking a little bit what it would mean or what it will mean to be successful in 2031. Collaboration and the freedom of the software is key. It's not just open source, it's the freedom of the software. It's important that we keep sharing, that we keep evolving our code base to fit the needs of the changing environment. And most of all, from my personal point of view, it's important to keep having fun. I started to work on Linux because I felt it was fun and we should keep doing that. So yesterday, Jim asked all of you to applaud Redhead for their great contribution. And there's no envy in that when I'm saying this. I work for a different company. I wear a green hat, not a red hat. I think it's right to applaud people for the good stuff that they have been doing. As distribution vendors, we sometimes think we're the center of the universe, but really we're standing on the shoulders of a lot of people. A lot of great developers. And on a personal note, I want to thank all of you, all of you who have contributed to Linux over the past 25 years for actually making my life better. I'm a happy man. I enjoy working on doing what I work. I have always enjoyed being part of this community, learning from you, and enjoying what I do. So thank you very much. So I definitely want... You bring up a really good point about all the people. Can I just have everyone who's ever contributed code to Linux in this room stand up for one second? Anybody? Look at that. Let's give these folks a big round of applause. And then we've got some... You know, one of the things about the community is, you know, I thanked Redhead. I will thank Susie again. But there are also a lot of unsung heroes out there. I think Mark Bolzern is out in the audience somewhere. I don't know if he's out here. Let's give him a hand. He was one of the early folks at Linux International. So let's give him a hand. John Maddog Hall. There he is right there. So there's a whole group of folks out there. And hopefully, you know, throughout the day and tonight at the Gala, everyone can thank folks who've had a, perhaps a less visible role, but have been important members of the community. And certainly all the folks at Susie are important folks as well. So thank you so much. All right. Thank you.