 Good morning, everyone. How are you today? I'm glad someone in the room's awake because I'm struggling a little bit This is simultaneously sort of a source of great pride pleasure and so forth for me and a source of amusement Having the talk at the start of debcom that's associated with the fact that my employer is the largest sponsor this year You know, that's cool, I guess but those of you who know me and have seen me at Every debcom since debcom to in Toronto so many years ago will understand that for me This is sort of an opportunity to do something I hope will be sort of fun and a little bit interesting and not something I'm going to take terribly terribly seriously from a corporate kind of perspective So what am I going to try and do today? Well first of all for those of you who haven't met me My name is B Dale. How many of you in the room have not seen me or heard me give a talk before? It's okay. Don't be shy. Wow At a debcom fever, I guess it's because this year I think we have a record number of attendees at debcom by a big amount. Is that cool or what? I I don't think I'm the only person in the room for whom this true It's true, but I've been involved with Debian since 1994 and So for me having made a very long-term Commitment to this project with lots of time and energy invested and lots of Uses of Debian in interesting ways Outside inside and outside the project. It's really exciting to me to see this level of participation this amount of enthusiasm But I must tell you I'm not surprised Because it mirrors very much what I've seen out in the corporate world since my return to The workforce from an early retirement last fall So for those of you who haven't heard me talk before and don't know me all that well You want me to use this one instead? It's on toast. Okay. Can I take this off then? I Really hate these things Okay, is that is that better? Oh? Everybody seems happier great And I can hear a little more audio, so let's be working better great Okay, so for those of you who haven't heard me talk before don't know me as well as some of those in the room do Just exactly who am I well? I tell people I made my first personal contribution of source code to this thing We now call free software open source in 1979. I Would not be surprised if a few of you haven't been on the planet that long. That's okay in 2012 I retired after Approximately 27 years at Hewlett Packard or its various subsidiaries The reason I left there are sort of two reasons I left one is they made one of these really crazy early retirement offers You know take lots and lots of money and go away, please But the other reason was that my son was just about to start high school and I Honestly because of my job it spent way too much time traveling and going to conferences and things like that and I really wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to do a few things with him before he was completely grown and gone away and That worked out really really well for about nine months and as those of you were in Switzerland will recall Wildfire then swept through Colorado and took my house away along with lots of other people's and the world got kind of strange for a while And that was a very very interesting experience to live through if you want to hear more details though That seems a little morbid. I did give a talk about that at Linux conference, Australia in January of 2014 And the video from that's up on the web if you'd like to go look Then a really interesting thing happened a guy I used to work for Who was HP's first vice president for open source and Linux back in? 2003 I guess and the author of the book called the business and economics of Linux and open source All of a sudden got promoted and is now HP's executive vice president and chief technology officer Which means he's the head of HP labs and he runs HP cloud and all sorts of other interesting things and Then you know a really funny thing happened Martin called and he said You remember all those conversations We used to have back in 2003 and 2004 about how if we could just get the right people in the company to say Yes, we could change a few things and maybe go change the world And I said yeah, and he said I am that guy now And so you know that combined with the fact that he just kept saying yes to what I thought were some sort of unreasonable demands I find myself back at HP. I'm now an HP fellow in the office of the CTO And my job is to help articulate HP's open source strategy It's kind of cool The thing that happens in parallel with that that for me makes it even more cool is As many of you know, I've been part of the Devian project as I said since 1994 I've done a few things in the project over that time I You know once more it's I've said on the boards of directors of some organizations probably Of greatest interest to my employers that I have a seat on the board of the Linux foundation But I don't represent HP on the Linux foundation board I represent individual members and developers And I'm actually kind of proud of that individual members of the LF Re-elect me each year. They've done it now for several years to represent their Needs and interest on that board HP's also a platinum member of the Linux foundation and Eileen Evans represents our interests there on that board I'm on the Board of the freedom box foundation I'm really excited that the freedom box 0.5 release which just came out had that much involvement for me. I had nothing to do with it I'm really excited about that because that means That even though that project took a huge hit in Schedule and visibility and so forth because of the things that happened to me in my life in 2013 That what's happening there is important enough that other people have been willing to pick it up and carry on with it And they're doing great work. So if that's a project you still care about I hope You're paying attention taking care of the things that are offered back to Debian from that community and trying to help make their work better The other thing though is I don't just do open source as a job Those of you who've known me for a long time understand that you know My biggest hobby is turning all of my other hobbies into open source projects I've given talks at various conferences over the years about Converting, you know, three-axis milling machines and the CNC things using a hundred percent open hardware and open software I've given talks about how to use GPL'd free software from the GNU radio project to do Amateur radio bouncing of radio signals off the moon. I've done all sorts of stuff like that But I'm also a member of the board of directors of Aleph objects, which is the parent company for something called lullspot Lullspot is interesting. They're a 3d printer company It was the first company in the world to receive the free software foundations respects your freedom award for all of their hardware designs And I'm really really proud to be part of that organization They're doing really cool stuff making really cool products and 3d printing is kind of a big deal these days And as those of you who've seen me at other dev counts before know along with Keith Packard who Unfortunately, couldn't be here this week and I'll explain why in a little bit Along with Keith I'm one of the co-founders of this little company called altos metron and we make open hardware and open source avionics for the high-power model rocketry Community because I love playing around with high-power model rockets I also do things with amateur radio satellites and after a long hiatus I'm pleased to report that a satellite that I built designed and built the processor board for is Expected to launch in about five or six weeks from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the US It's a Cube set which is a hundred millimeter cube and It has like a seven or eight board stack inside there one of which is a processor board using an arm cortex in three that Keith and I designed and I did most of the work to assemble and Yes, I literally there will be once again Circuit board with solder joints done in actually done in the garage of the apartment We were living in while we were displaced from the fire going to orbit and I just think that's super cool So those of you haven't don't know me all that well and don't know what I mean by high-power model rockets That's that's a typical toy for me. That's actually the first rocket that I flew after the fire That's out in southeastern Kansas in the United States And that airframe went to Mach 1.8 on the way to Should figure this out in advance Six and a half kilometers above ground so a flying prototypes of new electronics And the handsome young fellow there carrying the airframe back for me is my son Robert Did he make it into the room? Yeah, there he is Robert's actually with me this time So the way we're handling this I'm back to work thing is I actually brought him to the conference this time So this is not his first deb conf even though he will profess that he doesn't really remember much about the last time That's because it was an Edinburgh and he was literally Half of his life ago. So if you see Robert, please say hello All right, so what I really want to do today. I Titled this HP and W in a fresh perspective It's there's a little bit of a joke in there, right because I have probably the least fresh perspective Relationship between HP and W and if anybody in the room I had something to do with causing that relationship to happen though In all honesty, I'm not the one who picked Debian as HP's internal Linux development platform That honor goes to Steve Geary. Steve are you in the room somewhere? He may be down the other way he is here today though And if you would like to I'll be happy to introduce you to him He'll probably be hanging around the HP stand at some point What I want to do instead is I want to give you a little bit of history and Because I finally got around to thinking about what I should do in the way of presentation materials after the birthday party last night I cheated I went back through Presentations that I've given in the past about the relationship with it between HP and Debian And I thought it would be kind of fun to pull a few slides out of that to sort of tell the story and So I very carefully annotated on the lower left corner of each of the old slides What year that came from and so I hope that that will provide some of you who may remember a few of these You know some sense of amusement along with it But I'm gonna talk a little bit about the history and then I'm gonna talk about what's changing in the world And what has caused all of a sudden Someone like Martin Fink to end up being the chief technology officer at a company like HP and what that means For the relationship between HP and Debian and then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what I'm really excited about for the future Which is you know the reason that I think this isn't a short lived Change this is something where I would expect the relationship between HP and Debian to just get stronger over time in the future So back in 2009 I gave a presentation where I said that you know the powerful thought we all ought to keep in mind Is that it wasn't there was no longer a question of whether free software made sense But rather when and how to best use free software to pursue business objectives Can you tell us giving this to a business audience, right? But this is the kind of stuff that I used to say when I was running around as HP's chief technologist for open source and Linux And based on this I said look if you want to understand what I'm talking about why this makes sense There's a few basic ideas you need to have in mind one is That what's really important here is this idea of the community development model, okay? Open source is not a business model. It is at best a Different way of collaborating to produce and maintain software But it's a really good one and has some interesting attributes one of them is that there's no single company involved responsible Now as Bradley pointed out in his talk yesterday, which I hope many of you had a chance to attend and if you didn't I hope you'll Go take a look at the video on that at some point There are lots of cases today where particular open-source projects are backed by one or another company But in the main the Linux kernel and many free software applications really are developed and supported by this thing We call the community No one company in charge in a range of contributors with varied interest abilities coming from different social geographic economic and political backgrounds If you don't believe that please look around the room As someone pointed out to me yesterday one of the neat things about coming to debcom is we don't all look the same Where are lots of us coming from different places with different backgrounds and you know different interests all of whom have made Common cause to create this outstanding operating system and the thing that the whole free software world changed Is that we reduced this artificial barrier that had been created between producers and consumers of software In that time period where software that was being created was primarily being distributed in shrink-wrapped binary boxes There was this big distinction between those who could create software and those who were purchasing and using software What free software does it sort of was turned us to an earlier time when People working on computers collaborate with each other Every user has the flexibility because of the terms of the licenses that we choose to use To decide how they're going to get support for the software that they're using any user can become a developer When this started to become a big deal It was the beginning of sort of changing a lot of things about how the IT industry work And if you don't want to be a developer no problem You can pay somebody else to do it on your behalf and the reason this works is that we all have access to the source code We all are empowered to participate in this collaborative ecosystem And one of the really important things is if the upstream developer ever misbehaves Developers have the power to fork you can take a copy of the code and go create a new focal point development And this create provides a wonderful feedback mechanism to ensure that That's lovely. Thank you very much Yeah, I'm gonna need that soon You have the power to fork and we've seen this happen quite successfully in the free and open source software world Think back to what happened when X-free 86 forked and spawned what's now sort of the xorg free desktop world All of a sudden what had become a fairly stagnant development environment was Re-invigorated and lots of amazing things happen. We've seen it happen more recently with the split between Open office and Libra office and the creation of the document foundation and all of a sudden this immense enthusiasm and lots of developer energy going into Making better, you know desktop and productivity software. I am in fact using Libra office to make this presentation Not that's maybe one way in which I don't sort of do the same thing that lots of other people in Debian do but Makes it a lot easier to interact with folks in my day job. I will tell you And why is this so important for companies like HP well the emergence of this whole sort of idea of communities of collaborators enabled by the connectivity of the internet and Open access and open standards really changed the way software development happens first in the PC industry and now sort of spreading out from there and the reason for this is that It's really hard to predict where the next cool innovation is going to come from and so when you participate in an open and collaborative development ecosystem You empower people that you don't know exist To be able to do things that you couldn't predict and that's what innovation is all about So if companies want to successfully take advantage of the cool things that are being developed By people they don't know and could not predict the activities of them in in advance They have to learn to participate productively is citizens in this open and collaborative Community development process if they want to benefit from the consequences of this open innovation And so this is sort of the engine that has been behind the relationship that HP over the years through efforts of mine and many others of Who have attended deb cons this year and in the past to try and help drive is as a set of behaviors And after a while where this lettuce though the amusing part is when you check the date You notice this slide came from 2009 look where this one came from This one's from 2002 And this was at that time what HP was articulating and telling all of our customers and partners was the approach We were going to take to dealing with open source. We were going to participate as an open source community member There's an important distinction there. We didn't say we're going to work with the community We said we're going to go out there and be part of the community We're going to support community values and behaviors and in the process Work on the things that mattered to the company and to its employees which were building robust enterprise capabilities So that we take all of this free software goodness and make it useful to our biggest business customers One of the things I'm particularly proud of and Martin Fink had a lot to do with Is the fact that HP has used existing open source licenses? almost unique amongst our peers in the world of large companies hovering around the free and open source software world HP's never Created its own open source license Why we were really lucky to have some super smart lawyers at the right moment in history who looked around and said well There's nothing wrong with the GPL. Why don't we just use that? Gee, there's nothing wrong with the BSD license or the MIT license and later Nourn't that many things wrong with the Apache license. So We can we can use those. It's okay Though I will tell you if you When I make comments about that like that about the Apache license, I just have to point out that it's sort of an Interesting bargain when you create a license that's permissive with a strong patent grant If you're a net consumer of software under the Apache license Awesome, if you're a company that holds a steaming pile of patents and you're a net producer of open source software that's a big giveaway and The fact that we do as much as we do under that license probably says something about just how serious we are About wanting this whole thing to be successful and then we'd work with everybody out there to deliver Effective and innovative solutions basis block yet right marketing slide. Well, not really This slide actually came from Steve Geary and or someone on his team I remember pulling it from that deck and I remember just how amused he was when I started using this in lots of external talks So 2002 that's been a while right? So what's so fresh about that perspective? Well, we'll come back to that so HP and Debian Just how long and how deep is this relationship between the companies Between HP and Debian the company and the project Well, I tried to sort of sum this up in 2011 The reason that this that this relationship exists and has been around so long is that Debian really does matter Bradley gave one take on why he thinks Debian matters yesterday This was the take that I was articulating to people in and around to that In fact, the slides been around longer than that. It's just the deck that I pulled this from was from 2011 Why does Debian matter? It's it really is all about freedom It's about the fact that Debian has a very stable and functional development community I Had the opportunity Year and a half ago somewhere in the middle of the whole in its system discussion within the project to remind myself and many of you That there's a non vocal majority of Debian developers who just keep doing the right thing Making outstanding free software and ensuring that that outstanding free software is available to everybody in the world No matter what else is going on and that's immensely powerful The large number of architectures and packages has been a really important part of why Debian mattered to HP over the years Why is that? Well, you may remember a processor architecture called PA risk. You may remember Itanium Yeah, you know The fact that Debian has always been open to contributions and taken what we now call sort of the big tent approach The notion that if there's something you care about and you're willing to come do that on behalf of Debian It's okay. That can become part of Debian is immensely enabling for a company that has objectives they'd like to achieve and If the choice is go talk to a commercial partner and try to convince them That your vision is the one that is the right one and they say well Yes, as long as you have a really really big checkbook and are willing to pay less lots of money We're willing to go do that for you Or the alternative is you hire some smart people and you go join an open and collaborative Community and you do some work yourself and achieve the results you wanted to have at a lower cost and with a higher degree of Engagement and build some reputational equity in the process It's not a terribly difficult choice to make and Honestly, one of the things that I personally have found the most appealing about Debian over the time is the notion There are these benefits we get from having Policies that drive towards a uniform experience There are days when the way Debian policy is being created and adjusted gets frustrating and In particular if you're someone who has a really great idea that in the end does end up Changing the world and everybody in Debian wants to go do things that way That period of time where not everybody else sees it yet And you'd like to help sort of create a new vision and drive things forward But our policy process seems sort of reactive instead of predictive that can get kind of frustrating But on the flip side the fact that our policy is built by collecting and aggregating best practices that have been demonstrated and proven to be successful and Then we turn around and use that to drive the behavior of new packages. They're entering the archive gives us a uniformity a robustness and in some sense a scalability that I don't think any other Software project on the planet has had any dream of matching. It's been very interesting for example I've attended the last couple open stack summits and I watched the anxiety with which they're trying to decide whether it's okay to have more than a Dozen or so projects that are part of the core Thing that they call open stack I'm not close enough to those projects those specifics or to the politics on that to really Understand the tension very well but when I think about an organization a community that's struggling to deal with Transitioning from a dozen or so things inside the envelope to something bigger than that And I compare and contrast that with Debian where we now have what? 30 some thousand packages in the archive I've lost track. I used to pull that number for all of my talks and wow the you know the customers with it but I don't do that anymore. It's just the numbers are too big and then the other thing that's happened that I think you all Understand because of a few big visible examples like Ubuntu is that there's a huge downstream dependency chain a Lot of people use Debian and depend on it to create other things that matter to them This is true inside HP as well and not just for the big obvious things like the fact that a couple of times in history HP has created specialized variants of Debian to do particular things On our open-source review board Which takes a look at all of the proposed interactions between free and open-source software projects and proprietary software Projects inside the company. It's interesting how often when you dig down into the details of the proposal you see Debian version numbers Because even if all they're doing is pulling two or three source packages for something to go build an embedded device Inside the company people generally understand that Debian main is a place. They can go to find sources which are Package consistently likely likely to be rebuildable And where the license assertions and other meta data about the packages are being well cared for And so it ends up being embedded in lots and lots of interesting places So why does HP work with Debian? Well as I mentioned the sort of inclusive collaborative nature of the project aligns very well with our understanding of this Reality that the world is becoming more open and collaborative It's enabled us to go tackle some markets that were not being well served otherwise Those of you who remember back to one of the predecessors of the Linux Foundation OSDL May remember that there was this huge fiasco when the companies that were members of OSDL Sat down and created something called the carrier grade Linux specification This was a specification for the features and capabilities that these companies wanted to have Linux exhibit in order to be able to use it for building out the mobile phone network and the various applications that are part of that network around the world What happened well the kernel community did exactly what you would expect they said what do you mean? You have this big Specification you want us to all go right software against that's not how free software works if you want this do it Bring it to us. We'll tell you if it's reasonable and by the way Don't bring it all to us at the end come work with us so that we can see what your objectives are and Collaborate with you piecemeal and do all of this That was you know a huge fiasco because OSDL brought a bunch of companies together that created this Specification and sort of classic closed-room discussion Specification style and then sort of threw it over the wall the kernel community and the kernel community threw it right back at him Well, somebody at HP looked around and said well, you know It's not that it's a bad idea. It's just that that was the wrong way to go about it So what happened? Well HP put a team together that went and built an implementation of carrier grade Linux and It yielded a product that was called Debian GNU Linux with HP telco extensions Because in fact the easiest way to build that was to go do the kernel work that was required package up the few additional Protocol management utilities and so forth and bundle it all together on top of Debian and in fact there was a point in history where HP sold more units of itenium servers in the nebs compatible embedded into telco racks packaging running that software Then some industry analysts reported was the entire size of the itenium market So, okay, we only had three or four customers But they were the companies that built all the infrastructure for all the mobile phone systems in the world and as a result I was told at one point that one-third of all mobile phone calls every day on the planet Touched an HP integrity server running Debian GNU Linux with HP telco extensions Pretty cool. Is that still true today? I have no idea I haven't even talked to the guys that do the carrier grade telco stuff in HP for a while But that is still a business and HP sells a lot of stuff there. So there might still be some truth there I have no idea So anyway, great platform for internal developers and then the weird thing that happened eventually is that a server customers came along So but but but but you guys really seemed to understand Debian We really like your servers could would you like officially support Debian on your servers, please? And so there came a point in time where we actually went and did that now today Things have changed a little bit because you know everything's gotten broader and shallower in some ways So now instead of HP comm slash go slash Debian which by the way still works You can type that URL in it will URL in and it will still take you somewhere Where it really takes you is this page called community Linux and the other thing that's really changed is that back then the reason That was an important question Is that HP server platforms even though they were industry standard had some value-added platform management capabilities? And you really wanted the special software to work with those management capabilities and having somebody build packages of that for Debian So you could just install them and use them was considered important The world's changed since then there are open standards now for all of those management interfaces many of which were developed or driven by engineering teams at HP so today You go buy an HP server. You really don't need to have Special software in order to run a particular Linux distribution that parts just changed a little bit Which is part of what I meant about broader and shallower the shallower part is you don't need as much special software to make a supposedly industry standard server just work with Linux And all the right works being done to make sure things work well There've been lots of internal uses of Debian at HP Some of you probably don't know that a lot of the Debian org servers were donated at one time or another by HP And then we when we ran into that period during what's now called the global economic downturn And the money for just donating servers kind of dried up I came up with an interesting hack that allowed us to offer Hardware to Debian and kernel org and free desktop org and other people at our deepest commercial discount When you combine this with companies that you know did all of a sudden have lots of commercial success and lots of money We had some interesting donation partnerships where in the kernel space for example There were a couple of rounds where Google provided the money and we offered a super deep discount And the result was sort of a combined donation to the project where you know, we gave something mumble mumble percent of a discount Which was big and somebody else coughed up the rest of the cash And let me tell you that worked out really well for HP right because all of a sudden we're getting credit for donating stuff We actually got the money at the end of the day so But part of that's the reason that you know, this has ended up being a very long-lived relationship a number of years ago When John Corbett and the folks at Linux weekly news found themselves having to change their business model and charge for access to some of their content John actually called me and he said isn't there some way we can come up with To ensure that people in Debian don't have to pay to get to LWM I said you're right that that would be a great thing for somebody to figure out how to do and Not having any idea what would happen I sent a message at my management chain at HP at the time and a guy who worked a couple of clicks above me Martin Fink came back and said sure we could do that. What would it cost? You notice the sequence of that? He said yes, we could do that and then he asked what it would cost and Then of course I talked to John and John being John it cost a whole lot less than it really should have but for years now HP has been happy to sponsor a Corporate subscription to W to Linux weekly news on behalf of Debian developers If there any of you in the room who are Debian developers or Debian maintainers who don't have access to that Go do a little web search on it You'll find what the procedure is you will eventually when I get around to reading my email Get a cheery email back from me telling you that you now have full access to LWM because yes I still personally babysit that Okay, so a few highlights from HP and Debian early history the very first Dedicated to HP server master.debian.org is something I built out of cast-off hardware From a data center in HP in Colorado Springs and hosted for about a year and a half on HP's bandwidth I actually had permission to do that because I was the guy who managed that data center and The way we did internal accounting meant that it didn't cost anything extra and that was all okay until the corporate auditors Were due to come in and I was a little concerned that I might have questions to answer about what that thing over in the corner was At which point you know things changed and got broader and we brought in other folks who had better control over Some of those decisions than I did at that point in history But I still think it's pretty amusing today that I can stand up here and publicly tell you That I built a server and hosted it in an HP data center and my managers at HP You're actually proud of the fact that I was doing that back then There was direct investment made by Debian in The ports of or by HP in the ports of Debian to PA risk in itanium, which is the I-64 architecture When I said direct investments PA risk I'll tell you a funny story. I when HP and compact did their merger acquisition thing Compact had previously purchased digital equipment corporation and Digital equipment corporation was the company that built the original Vax computers and Many of you in the room probably aren't old enough to remember Vax's or to think Vax's were cool But there was a point in history where Vax is particularly Vax's that were running Berkeley Unix were really really cool And so it happened that the day the merger was consummated I was in Dayton, Ohio at The annual Dayton amateur radio convention the Dayton hamvention, which is the largest at the time was the largest Gathering of amateur radio operators every year in the world. I understand that Friedrich Schaffin might actually be as big or bigger now But who knows? The point is I was walking around in the flea market and I saw some Russian guys selling used Microvax machines, and I couldn't help myself. I bought one And I took it I took it home And well that night from the hotel room I put an email out on the internal mailing list for open source and Linux stuff And I said hey in honor of the consummation of the merger and the acquisition of the residuals to the Vax by HP I'm pleased to announce the formation of the Debian Vax port. I Sent this to a lot of people and I got exactly one reply And it was from Martin Fink and it was a one-liner and he said well that certainly makes the PA risk port look more relevant now doesn't it? So anyway, you know PA risk. Yes that architecture But it is kind of PA risk was a really the kernel work on PA risk was really important to HP because that was a thing That got HP to realize that this community open collaboration model really really worked You know people that HP didn't know about and wasn't employing got to a shell prompt booting Linux on a PA risk system without HP's help and Once the company saw that they kind of went oh wow, you know Could we have some of that please and that led to a lot of things that happened later a Thing I'm particularly personally proud of that some of you will remember is that HP sponsored the legal work that originally allowed us to include Crypto code in us main and if that had never happened in the world would probably be a different place As I mentioned we contributed a lot of stuff another thing that I mentioned yesterday in the Where was it in the newcomer session? I guess is that starting at debcon 3 in Oslo? HP's been a major financial sponsor of debcon for every year. Why? It seems really simple to me. It's obvious to me that every time We help sponsor as a company an opportunity for individual developers to get together and meet each other and build social relationships To have a meal with each other to have a beer with each other to sit around and talk about what's important to them in the world They build relationships that can survive the intensity of online communications that sometimes get really contentious if you if when you read an email from somebody You have in your mind a picture of what that person looks like and what kind of you know beverage They prefer and you know do they smoke or not and you know do they bathe often enough or not? And all of those things it's a whole lot easier to put what they're saying in context Right because the problem with a lot of online text based communications is when that message comes in You have to figure out what the person was trying to tell you you can see the words But that doesn't always give you the meaning and this is why I'm really proud that HP has been You know there've been some years where other companies put up more money that year But if we sum it from debcon 3 and Oslo until today HP has been a sponsor every year at some level and The number is the biggest which is kind of cool You know I've already talked about a couple of thin clients You know thin clients little things that are Computers with a display and a keyboard and a mouse that don't have disk drives and don't have a local copy of the software image Unless nowadays it's often burned into flash Little known secret when HP became the number one seller of thin clients in the world It was done with Debian running on the inside of every single one of them Even the ones we were selling to customers who were going to run remote Windows instances off of shared Windows server thingies What was running in the thin client was Debian? and Because of the success with that they've done some other really interesting things since then point of sales systems which are frankly a lot like thin clients We actually built some Debian based desktop systems that sold quite well in emerging markets Emerging markets, you know what I mean the place is like China and India and so forth Why does this stuff not show up in the rest of the world? Well, I gave a talk about that at Linux conference, Australia in 2013 because it was after I retired and before the fire where I talked about sort of the economics and the challenges associated with the desktop market and why Linux on desktops is a really challenging business proposition But lots of other folks have pointed out since that that doesn't really matter because who cares about desktops anyway This is running Linux most of these are running Linux sadly very few of them are running Debian We could do better there, but whatever But I'm very proud that this relationship between HP and Debian over the years yielded lots of interesting fruit And it was only part of a larger strategy that has led to a situation where for more than 15 years HP has been the largest seller of stuff to people running Linux and That stuff includes servers. It includes, you know high availability software that you can run on top of Linux to you know do enterprise sort of data center things in the Personal system space. It's you know, there's lots of Linux based things there that are being sold And even in the enterprise services world We build an awful lot of solutions for a lot of customers using Linux and open source stuff So that's sort of the end of the history part. What's changed? Well, the good news is for the relationship between HP and Debian The things that have changed are causing this relationship to just keep getting more important and better over time But I think it's useful to understand what the thinking is in places like HP about what's happening in the IT world today The first thing is that businesses under are continue to be under intense pressure That's been true for a long time. It just hasn't changed Because of those pressures There's been an emergence of a change in the way people think about building technology solutions because the reality is People build IT solutions to solve business problems Right in the in the corporate world and we're now into a model where the intersection of mobility social networking big data in the cloud is Leading us to do almost everything in an open and collaborative kind of model And HP strategy these days at the top. This is not the open source strategy This is the company strategy is to provide solutions for this new style of IT Yeah, it's a marketing slide. Don't worry about the details But what this means is that that Something has changed a little bit in the way HP thinks about open source that slide that I showed you from 2002 was all about we're going to go be part of Mostly existing communities. We're going to use their licenses. We're going to participate as good citizens We're going to drive the features and capabilities that matter to us The thing that's kind of changed in the time since then is the number of places where a new piece of software Created from scratch by the company to solve some problem that the company sees our customers having Is now being released as a completely open-source thing This is one example. That's recent that many of you probably haven't seen unless DevOps is your thing Cloud slang I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about these I'm going to show you the names of a couple of projects and if these are spaces you're interested in please go take a look This is a tool for helping to automate various DevOps use cases There's another project very green which is just in the process of being released right now But you can go search for it and find the source repository out there right now This is it's a gated check-in process for Software Collaborative software projects. It's somewhere kind of between a do-nothing approach And what happens with Garrett and some folks are finding this to be in a very productive part of CI solutions that they want to build today Another project that's come out of HP very recently was announced Publicly at HP Discover in Las Vegas a few weeks ago is a new user interface and user experience framework called grommet Grommet is a project that HP started frankly because we looked around our CEO looked around and said, you know We've acquired a bunch of companies that had a bunch of interesting software assets We have this cool portfolio of solutions. We're delivering to our customers today wouldn't it be nice if they all looked like they came from the same company and Instead of just sort of making them all share the same shiny Part of what grommets tried to do is ensure that parts of the experience really are consistent That when you go to a search bar that what it means to search has some sense of consistency to Not just where the search bar is placed and how you type in it and what it looks like But how it works underneath is also sort of consistent. I will be completely honest with you and tell you I don't write this kind of software. I have no personal ability to judge how great Grommet is or isn't but I do know that the companies put a lot of energy into developing and building this doing customer focus groups to figure out how to make things look Good in ways that will be Productively usable and I really hope that this ends up having a big impact on the world as a result There are a bunch of folks from HP here this week some of whom are deeply involved in helium Which is HP's open stack implementation? One of the things I wanted to point to in here Which you had if you were in Portland you had the opportunity to hear about a year ago is this thing called H? Linux H Linux is a branded subset of Debian that HP uses at the base of its helium Open-stack implementation H Linux is over time starting to have broader application and as we move towards the future It's going to get even more important. I Have very little time left But I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes telling you about the thing that makes me so excited About having been invited to go back and do some work at HP for a while And it's this thing that Martin Fink at HP has named the machine out of curiosity How many of you have heard about the machine? For the rest of you I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about it if you go do a web search on HP the machine or think the machine you can find Some video presentations about this and some other presentation materials the fundamental idea is that as we See the emergence and intersection of a couple new lines of Development that have been research projects in places like HP labs for a lot of years Coming into the marketplace almost simultaneously We have the opportunity to rethink what servers really mean and all of a sudden the notion that a server can mean a huge pile like really large numbers of special purpose cores Interconnected with chip level photonic interconnects. I'm not talking about fiber optic off the edge of the circuit board I'm talking about actual integrated circuits with optical interconnects to other things on the board and Really massive memory pools by which I mean think about a single system with something like 168 petabytes of bite-addressable non-volatile storage. That's as fast as DRAM Can we do that today? No. Is it coming soon? Yes And what's the implication of that? Well if you're going to bring something like the machine to life and It's changing this many characteristics of what servers have been like in the past It's opened up a whole range of parallel research activities that have been underway in HP labs Here's the big sort of interesting news Those research activities may eventually lead us to discover Some characteristic of these hardware systems that cause us to believe that some operating system other than Linux would be the right solution We haven't found one today. So Linux will be the first perhaps the only for a while operating system for the machine The reason Keith Packard couldn't be here at deb-con for this year is that he recently rejoined HP to serve as chief architect for the Linux implementation on the machine and as a result He's at the Linux foundations Linux con North America this week giving a keynote about the implementation of Linux for the machine Yeah, they asked me if I'd give a keynote and I said, sorry, I'm gonna be in Heidelberg at deb-con if I couldn't possibly do that and So my apologies to Keith for helping to ensure that he couldn't be at deb-con this year But the developers working on the machine in HP labs and elsewhere in the company are running H Linux H Linux is deb-in and then finally the intersection of these large fast bite-addressable Non-volatile memories and device level photonic interconnect really is going to change the way we think and this is going to lead over time to the release into open source of a number of new Libraries and application development tools that will help to take advantage of the performance of systems with these kind of Characteristics the first one of those that we've put out is this library called photos. It's a research project It's not something you should go drop Oracle to run this instead. Believe me, but There's some interesting things that we're learning because for the first time in decades The things that the machine is going to bring are motivating us to do fundamental research into operating systems and applications Development that in a way that corporate development labs just haven't been doing very much for a while This is the first of what I hope will be Dozens of new open source projects. This is GPL code GPL with a class path linking exception because it's a library and we want people to be able to use it but Look forward to more of this stuff coming in the future So to wrap things up. I hope I've shown that free and open-source software really enables us to have this new style of IT This is the sort of combination of Mobile social cloud big data all you know the popular buzzwords today HP has been and will continue to be not just a participant in all of this But an open and collaborative leader in the free software world and that HP's collaboration with Devian has been going on for a long time and I just don't see any possibility other than that continuing to go up and to the right in the future Thank you very much for your time and attention I'm getting the please shut up because your time's out things from the back But if anybody has a burning question or two, I'm certainly happy to answer one or two before I walk away And while unfortunately my son Robert has to go back home tomorrow because school starts for him on Tuesday morning I will be here until Sunday and I'll look forward to having lots and lots of conversations with many of you about many different Topics during the week. So once again, thank you very much for your time and attention and for all the cool things you do for Devian