 from Seattle, Washington. Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE on the ground at LinuxCon North America 2015. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Hi, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. It's theCUBE. We're on the ground here in Seattle for LinuxCon. I'm here with Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of Linux Foundation. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. We're on the ground. Great event. What's going on here at LinuxCon? Well, what's going on here is all of the key maintainers of the projects that run most of our society are here to meet, whether it's Linus Torbald, the guy who created Linux, which powers almost everything out there. The creator of Docker, Solomon is here. The Node.js guys are here. We've got folks from all over the place meeting, getting together, sharing ideas, and innovating on this technology. It's a hands-on kind of place. Yeah, and this is really the foundation of innovation. One of the things we've been covering is, with Linux, obviously it's been around for decades, but the innovation now mainstream, first-class citizen. You have Ping Li from Excel partners. I saw him kicking around. Investors are here. The creators, the innovation engine of under the covers of cloud, mobile, big data, all this stuff's happening here. What are some of the highlights? Well, so we've got a few things going on here. One, IBM announced a Linux on the mainframe project this week, which is a huge commitment to Linux on big mainframes. And people say, hey, mainframes, are those still around? Well, they run 100% of all credit card transactions worldwide. It's the fastest-growing market for Linux. So it's a huge commitment from IBM, Computer Associates, and all of their partners to go do that. We launched two more projects in networking, one called IOvisor. We launched a project in storage technology called Kinetic. We launched a new security program to work with open source projects to create badges that will indicate that they care about security and follow best practices in security. So lots of stuff going on here. But I think most importantly, as you have developers and operations come together, the developers, the guys who actually make the decision on all the software that's in your data center are here with the operators, the admins and architects of the most demanding infrastructure in the world, really creating the next generation data center. Yeah, and things like Docker come out of LinuxCon, a lot of innovations, a lot of new starts, a lot of innovation, a lot of people move the ball down the field. So I've got to ask you, what is the innovation vibe that you're seeing here this year? Because innovation and open source has traditionally been a technology game, but now the business model changes are how? You're seeing IBM with Z, system Z, you're seeing all kinds of open core, you got pure play, you got hardcore, all kind of playing nicely together. What's the take on that? Business model innovation and the technology innovation. What's new? Well, what companies have learned is that open source is already a better way to innovate, right? So it's a faster, cheaper way to make software. But what they've also learned is that they can help themselves through helping others by essentially shedding commodity R&D, the things that everybody needs, but doesn't really matter to your customer. And then they innovate below, in the case of IBM, with hardware and the mainframe, above in the case of application developers who create analytics on top of this open source software that their customers care about. Or even alongside, if you look at companies like Facebook or Netflix or Twitter, these are firms that are service companies run entirely on open source infrastructure. They open source most of that infrastructure because as companies who have similar types of hyperscale computing models, they can all improve each other, they all win. Well, my Apple watch is going off, so I got to bring you the internet of things. It's a new paradigm. Obviously, security's in the news, but actually Madison being hacked, pretty high-profile, obviously, for the reasons being kind of a dating, kind of a cheating site. This brings up the whole notion of security. I mean, open source has been a spy versus spy game. The good guys versus the bad guys, all this is going on. How do you enable the innovation of, say, wearables and internet of things, same time maintaining that security? Well, so we have a couple of projects, one called IoTivity, which is an open source implementation for a standard way for device-to-device communication, IoT, things to communicate. We have another project called AllScene, which is similarly allowing devices to communicate to each other. And all of them have a set of security practices that they follow very rigorously to make sure that code is secure. But, you know, we're not in the kind of, you know, them versus the other game here. What we really want to encourage at the Linux Foundation and at our events is, you know, how do we write more secure software in the first place? How do we have fewer bugs? You won't eliminate all, but how can we do better testing coverage? How can we do better analysis of code? How can we do better peer review of code? How can we have security practices? That will just create less vulnerabilities, less security problems in software in general. That's really, think of us like, not as a surgeon who's remedying a zero day, but more of like a personal trainer who's just trying to make software better. Yeah, and let's take that to the next level. I mean, open source has a track record now. You can actually have generations of open source now, especially with security, and the paradigm is pretty clear. When it's out in the open, it is ultimately going to be more secure. Hopefully more eyeballs make all bugs shallow, but there are certain projects that are critical to society that don't get a lot of eyeballs. We'd like to help those projects get more eyeballs, and we're working on it. Well, tier one citizen has word that's been kicked around, certainly Red Hat has an SLA over a decade now, some of their rail stuff, and now you're seeing a Docker now going multi-year and getting better and better. This is the dynamic in corporate America where open source is the viable alternative to proprietary, and that's a great thing. So where has that changed the game, this notion of first class citizen? Well, again, what I think it's done is it allows companies to focus on that 20% of the software that's in their infrastructure that their customers, I should say, actually care about, right? I mean, as a user, what you care about is the experience you have on Facebook. If you're an advertiser, you care about the ad programming algorithms that are on there. You don't care about the database, the operating system, and all of the stuff underneath that really enables that business. And so as open source has become, essentially the de facto way to create, whether it's a public cloud service provider like Amazon or Google or a streaming video service like Netflix, as it's become the core of that, Netflix focuses on what they care about the most, which is their customers, their data, and the things that really matter to their firm. Two final questions, what's the core theme this year if you had to kind of boil it over and generalize it? The pattern you're seeing in the sessions, the attendees, in terms of topics and interests, and then two, what's the coolest thing that you've seen here? Oh, that's a great question. Well, the coolest thing I saw here, I'll start with that, is I had a great dinner with Linus Torvalds last night, who's always widely entertaining. The buzz around here is how to accelerate open source innovation further. How to take an email conversation that may have taken two months to resolve a technical issue and just resolve it right here on the spot. What things can we do to do joint testing work that's really interesting and sort of enabling, open source, not just within one project, but across many, many projects? And so I think that's taking sort of, Exactly, and open source has certainly proven to scale, but you know, In terms of the people and their actions. Exactly, but I think it's looking for new opportunities about how to collaborate, not only within a project, but across projects that's interesting to me. Great, and so for the folks out there that are watching who aren't here, share the vibe here, what are they missing? You're missing an opportunity to talk to the people who write the code that runs most of the world and the people who deploy that software in the world's most demanding infrastructure, whether it's on EC2 or the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. If you wanna have a conversation directly with those folks, this is the place to do it. And it's great too, the sessions are great, but more the lobby conference is going on, people in the lobby, it's in the VCs, welcome again, so Excel partners down the trenches, doing the work, the investments are here, startups, any hot startups you wanna share with folks out there that you've seen here? I can't speak to that as I'm a horrible investor, I'm an investor in open source and I run a non-profit, so I'll leave it to Ping and the folks at Excel, but good for them to be on the ground here talking with the actual developers who are the closest to the technology that will be core to that next unicorn that comes out of Silicon Valley. Open source is the fertile soil, fueling the innovation of future. This is where unicorns come from. They're all grazing out in the lobby, this is John Furrier with theCUBE, here on the ground in Seattle at LinuxCon, thanks for watching. Thank you.