 Live from Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE, covering Open Networking Summit 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation. Sure, so as you were saying, Open Daily, it really kind of kicked things off from a open source networking standpoint. I mean, there were certainly other open source controllers earlier in sort of the market life cycle, but they kind of never really made their way out of the universities. Open Daylight was the first that really had a lot of commercial participation and uptake, kind of in the real world, so to speak. So with that, I think there was a lot of learning that happened both on the vendor side with regard to open source, as well as on the user side. And as the Open Daylight platform matured and started coming to fruition, we started seeing a lot of other projects sort of both below at the platform layer, as well as further up the stack. So at this point, and we've been talking about this quite a bit here at ONS, we've been talking a lot about sort of the whole Open Networking Stack that has sort of come to fruition now, that really low level stuff, DPDK was just announced today, FIDO, which is sort of big data for networking, and then all the way up the stack to ONAP, which was just announced last month. ONAP is a bringing together of the ECONT project that was started by AT&T, and then they brought it to the Linux Foundation and Open O, which actually sort of germinated within the Linux Foundation with a lot of input from both a number of small vendors as well as major carriers, particularly in Asia. So bringing those things together at the orchestration layer. And so now we've got this sort of whole stack, a lot of it is Linux Foundation projects, some of it is other projects with other open source foundations, all of which we work with very collaboratively across all of those different projects. But at this point, we're really kind of looking at how do we enable people to consume this a little bit more easily from the user side, and then also from the developer side. There are a lot of developers who are involved in multiple different projects, which of course means that they're spread very thin across all those projects, and we're looking at how do we make it a more feasible and scalable activity for them. So for example, Open Daylight is upstream of a lot of other projects. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of dependencies on Open Daylight. So how do we streamline the release train in such a way that everybody gets what they need at the time that they need it so they can do their releases on a timely basis and so forth and so on. And that makes things a lot easier from a developer standpoint. That also sort of naturally improves the integration points between those projects, which is of course better for users. So those are a lot of the things that we have in motion sort of across the Linux Foundation. And I think that the other thing that we've really seen over the last year coming to fruition is a lot of the early adopters of Open Daylight in particular have now spent enough time working with the open source community, either through their vendors or increasingly directly themselves, that they kind of get this open source thing and they understand kind of what the processes are and why we do things the way they do. And so they're willing to take a much more active role. And so that's a, you know, AT&T is a prime example of that, right? I mean, they were working on ECOMP themselves internally and they very quickly came to the realization that in order to scale it as quickly as they needed to, I mean, they were putting, you know, tens of thousands of their developers through specialized boot camps, right? They're networking people to become networking developers. But at the same point, you just can't push people through the system that fast enough nor can you hire enough people that fast enough. And so that's why they decided to bring it to the open source community. It seems like there's kind of an acceleration of carving out some piece of what was proprietary and putting it out to continue the development in an open source world. AY, you kind of answered the question just now in terms of, you know, just not enough people, but more interestingly, you talked about, you know, some open source stuff just never gets going. What are some of the real secrets that make an open source project run versus those that don't, you know, die on the vine? Yeah, there are a lot of different components, of course, like with anything. Some of it is technical, right? Do you have the right architecture? Is it one that can scale? Is it extensible? Are the right kinds of people involved in the project? Is the project being informed by the right kinds of people? So if you go and build something that nobody needs, either because you don't have the right people involved or because you're not open to that feedback, it's going to die on the vine. So, you know, a successful project really has to have a strong community around it. And it's a, you know, chicken and egg thing, right? You know, how do you get a strong community? Well, you have the right processes in place, but you also make sure that you have the right people involved so that they can build the right kind of thing and that they have the skills to do it effectively. And the other interesting trend that we're seeing is the Linux Foundation is becoming kind of the hub where you put these things to grow. And as you said, really to cross pollinate with the other open source projects that have all these interdependencies. And that seems to be an accelerating trend as well, at least from the outside looking in. Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And, you know, I think we learned a lot with Open Daylight and also with OpenStack. You know, when OpenStack started, and OpenStack, of course, is even older than Open Daylight, but when OpenStack started, I think there was all kinds of euphoria in the industry because Open Source was relatively new to infrastructure and infrastructure people. You know, it was like, I can build everything that I ever wanted to build now. And so there was this sort of irrational exuberance about feature proliferation. In some ways, a little bit kind of at the expense of platform stability initially. And at a certain point, the users, again, started getting involved and said, that's great. We need the thing to actually work at scale in real world environments. Please focus on that. And that's the real beauty and strength of Open Source is when you have users who care and see the possibility of a project, they can be actively involved and actively influence where the focus of the project is going to be. And that's how you get to something that's going to be useful to people quickly. Well, it'd be great to hear a little bit more about how you, I'm always kind of mystified as a analyst or a journalist or whatever, when you see these things. The press release comes out, own app is the new thing, right? And there's a new thing like every week. How do you ensure the success? How do you get the momentum behind it? I imagine there's a lot of stuff that's been happening behind the scenes for own app. We try not to keep it to behind the scenes. You know, what has always been part of Open Source culture and has proven to be a best practice is openness and transparency of not just the code itself but the processes around it. If people feel like they understand what's going on, that things aren't being hidden from them, that they can have a voice, they're much more actively willing to participate. And so that's really kind of the key to building any kind of community. And how do you work with a big carrier like, I mean, the fascinating part about this for me is like for our viewers who don't know what own app and ONOS and ODLR, it's basically all this carrier software that's becoming Open Source and they're just putting it out there saying, it's no longer our family jewels, everybody can use it. I mean, that's a big leap for an AT&T, you know? Tell us how you work with AT&T or Verizon or are they some of these big, gigantic organizations? Like they just hand you a thumb drive or how do you get the intellectual property? How does that process start? You know, in the case of AT&T, they reached out to the Linux Foundation and said, you know, we want and need to do this, help us do it. We don't know how this works, help us teach us. You know, but it's very much a, you know, I think a big part of the role of the Linux Foundation in all of this sort of project proliferation and so forth is teaching people how to do Open Source effectively. Because again, it's not just about throwing coders at a problem because you can do that inside your own organization as well. It's understanding how to do that in a collaborative manner, how to carve off what parts to Open Source because AT&T's ECOMP platform, you know, not all of it has been Open Source. Some portion of it, the stuff that's really, you know, important and proprietary and is sort of the crown jewels, that has stayed internal. But they've shared a fairly large percentage of the base platform with the Open Source community. And, you know, learning to draw that line is an art. And figuring out, you know, what is commodity and really could and should be shared with the rest of the world so that we're not all reinventing the same wheel. But all, you know, rather than having 10 developers here doing that and 10 developers here and da, da, da, da, we can put 30 developers all working together to get the same thing more quickly. And, you know, sort of, you know, that shift in mindset can take a little bit of time and a bit of education. And that's kind of part of what the Linux Foundation brings to that process of onboarding new Open Source projects as well. And then on the other end, I always think of Randy Bias, you know, he's one of our favorite guests, especially with OpenStack. And, you know, it was a couple of OpenStack Silicon Valley's ago where, you know, he was somewhat critical on the other end saying, you know, we also have to kind of rein things in and, you know, you have all this risks of stuff going all over the place and how do you kind of have some organization at the top end because of successful growth can drive a bunch of different agendas and things can get forked. So, you know, it's not a simple thing to manage. And, you know, we've tried different models and different approaches within different projects and we've learned a lot from that. I mean, you know, Open Daylight was very much a, you know, you guys figure it out hands-off kind of model. You know, other Open Source projects have been very top-down, you know, from their governance structure to everything else. Others like OpenO were kind of in between where they did specifically set up an architecture committee that was composed of, you know, sort of the leading members of the project because, again, OpenO in particular is touching the business layer of these carriers. And so they really need that architecture to be meeting their specifications. You know, sort of at lower layers, it's sort of a little bit less critical. And so there are lots of different models and sort of a gradation of, you know, top-down versus bottom-up and, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. And there are pluses and minuses to all of them. I think that we've been sort of learning as we go through all these different projects of what works. And different, sometimes it's worth shifting the model, starting out one way and shifting as you go along as the project matures too. But the net net, which I think you said at the beginning, is that big companies are now really learning how to operate effectively in this world, this Open Source paradigm. It's matured way, way, way beyond what we used to always joke years ago as a free puppy, you know? No, and, you know, I mean, I think telcos understand now that it is, yes, it's a free puppy, you still have to do lots of work. I think that understanding is sort of starting to trickle into the enterprise. I still have, you know, every time I do a briefing people will ask me to tell them about my product and I say I don't have a product. I can't sell you anything. You know, I help bring together a bunch of building blocks that you and your vendors can put together, but I don't have a product. And that's, you know, that's a major mind shift for especially enterprise IT where they're used to buying things off the shelf. And so larger enterprises are starting, again, they tend to take their cues from the carriers as things get proven out in the carrier world. And so we're starting to see that those same level of understanding and also drivers in large, especially very distributed types of organizations where they have, you know, 50, 100, hundreds of different sites around the world that they need to have, you know, a centralized view of in some fashion. And, you know, the only way they can get there is with SDN and they have a very strong preference, a very clear preference for open source. How big is the Linux Foundation now? By what metric? People, I guess. Oh, people, we're a few hundred, no more. But, you know, it's not just, we're not the ones doing all the work, right? Where we organize things, we help things happen, we help teach people, we provide the infrastructure. It seems like growing very fast, like new projects are being added and merged. But again, it's vendors and it's users. Very grassroots. Yeah, we help, you know, provide the legal framework and the technical, you know, test facilities and things like that and kind of the organizational guide rails. But that's, you know, we're here to help. We're not the ones doing the work. Right, right. All right, Lisa, so I'll give you the last word before we sign off here. As you look forward to 2017, what are some of your kind of top priorities for this next year? Yeah, so several things. First order is really enabling our users to really be successful with the projects that they already have in hand. In many cases, they're well through the phase of proof of concept and all the way onto production. And we just want to make sure that they're continuing to get everything they want out of the project and supporting them and supporting their vendors and really building out the commercial ecosystem around it so that they have a strong base of support. So that's one thing. Certainly on the open daylight side with some of the newer projects, it's really about, you know, figuring out what are the best practices that we can implement for this project, for this project, for this project in order to make sure that they're successful. And a lot of that, again, is that whole harmonization effort that we have going on. Right, right. All right, Lisa K, which you know is all about bringing an open source to the enterprise and thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Scott Rainovich. You're watching theCUBE from Open Networking Summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching.