 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back here to the BCEC. We're in Boston, Massachusetts, Red Hat Summit. The sixth time around for us here at theCUBE. Proud to be a part of this event once again, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, and thank you for joining us here on theCUBE, we continue our coverage. We're joined by Stormy Peters, who is the senior manager and community lead at Red Hat and Stormy, good afternoon to you. How are you doing? Good afternoon. Glad to be here. All right, so you think about, I love the community lead. In an open source based company, you're like Red Hat, your job is very simple. Expand and evolve the ecosystem, right? So I mean, how are you, I guess, using that company culture, that embedded culture to grow, I think it's already pretty well established, what your reputation is, for how open you guys are, right to the community and what have you, what are you doing in terms of leveraging that and trying to expand on that reputation? Yeah, our goal is to make sure we're supporting those upstream communities, so all of Red Hat software is open source, and we work with a whole community of individuals and companies in the upstream open source software, and we want to make sure that we're not just contributing features that we want, but that we're a good player, that we're helping to make sure those communities are healthy. And so for a number of the projects that we're involved in, we actually assign a full-time community manager, a community lead, to help make sure that project is healthy. So we have someone on everything from Seth and Gluster to Fedora to Kubernetes, just making sure the community does well. So, Stormy, you actually did a session for analysts about a month or so ago, and I've been involved with open source for about 20 years, and you said something that made me do a double take and had to rethink the way I look at this community and it was, we used to think of open source as, well, maybe I worked on a project or maybe I spent a little bit of time on nights and weekends and it was just kind of giving of time. You said that a majority of people working in this, they've got day jobs that is contribution to this. It's, you know, we understand that companies like, you know, IBM and Red Hat and Google, often will have that, but the majority of people that are contributing open source now, that is their job or a major part of their job. Could you expand a little bit about, you know, how we saw that shift and is it just me that it snuck up on? So, I think it snuck up on us, all of us, but I really do think it's a fundamental shift that we need to consider so that we can make sure that we're helping the ecosystem the best way possible. So, when open source first started, it was people in their free time, you know, Linus Torvalds had a project he wanted to work on, you had an itch to scratch, you wanted your desktop to run free software, and so you put your free time into it, evenings and weekends, and if you got a page job working on it, like that was something to celebrate, that was everybody's dream. And these days with software becoming, I want to say more complicated, more complex, and the solutions are even bigger and greater with the cloud, they're more than a one person project, they're like multi-people, multi-company projects, and so more and more people are getting paid to work on them, and they're getting 40 hours a week paid time to work on these projects, they might give more, but they're getting a full time salary. And so how we include not just the individuals, but the companies that are paying them to work on it, I think changes how our projects work, I think it's a huge opportunity. And talk about that shift a little bit if you would then, and how that has, I wouldn't say matured the marketplace, but certainly it's altered the flows of jobs and innovation and development and all that because all kind of past time before, now full time, and what comes with that? I mean, what challenges come with that where all of a sudden it is a little, it's a little more apparent, if you will, right? And you're a little more evident in wherever you're working because it is a full time commitment now, it's no longer just a casual or less than full time pursuit. Yeah, I think it's a good thing, but I do think it adds challenges. So for example, onboarding process, you used to know when you had an open source offer project, you got it, someone was giving up an hour or two of their evening to learn your project, and so you had to make sure that getting started docs worked for them within 20, 30 minutes maybe. These days, it's really hard to install a lot of this software in 20 or 30 minutes, but someone's doing it as their day job, they're going to have a day or a week, so the onboarding process is different, which I think makes it harder for volunteers and easier for paid, volunteers and paid is a little hard to distinguish, but for people that have all day to do it, they have a little more time to get onboarded, so the onboarding processes take longer. I think the problems that we can solve are more complex because someone can spend an entire week, they're not breaking their thought process up in like evenings, they have like all day, they can work with teams across companies, so you can pull in lots more expertise. We have special interest groups and projects like CentOS, where we're pulling in different companies to work together, so like we're working on an NFV, say with Intel and others, so you get more diversity of people that can work on it, that can dedicate more brain power to it in one setting. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about, you've worked on foundations and you support foundations, talked about special interest groups, it's a broad and very diverse ecosystem, sometimes the outside world is like, oh, it's the open source community, and I'm like, no, no, no, there is not the open source community, there are communities and lots of overlap and they work in Iraq, maybe give us a little bit of context and love to hear some examples of some of the things you're working on. Yeah, so I think the first point is like, projects aren't how they work, their governance isn't static, like it's always changing, like you might start a project on your own in your free time and it grew and you convinced all of us to join you and now there's 20 people working on it and you want to be able to go on vacation and you want to leave somebody in charge, so do you give them maintainer status? Do you create a board and let people vote? So do you create a foundation? Like someone offers you money, how do you take it? Like do you put it in your bank account or do you have to start a like non-profit to take this money? So I think they're constantly evolving. So an example that I have is the CEP foundation, we created the CEP foundation this year, last year, recently and CEP has been open source, it was open source created by Ink Tank acquired by Red Hat, we created a board of advisors around it to keep all those companies involved and it had evolved to the point where people wanted to give it money and so it needed to be something, these companies wanted to collaborate on marketing together. So we created the CEP foundation as a directed fund in the Linux foundation and had like 30 companies joined in the very beginning. So I think, I don't know what the next stage for CEP will be but they're always evolving like that. But so what does it do, if you will, CEP? How do you pick projects? If you have 30 voices, a lot of voices, a lot of people raising their hand saying let's look at this, look at that, how do you govern that? How do you assign work? How does all that work in that kind of, that's a really open environment that you're trying to corral a little bit. So we're not trying to corral, we're trying to like... Or organize, how about that? Better work, better work. So the CEP foundation was to enable people to collaborate on a marketing side mostly, a money side, they wanted to give money for like the CEP account event that's happening in a couple of weeks, there was a big annual event and they wanted to be able to do CEP days and things that you want to give money to to enable. And it was getting really complicated. Well you pay for the beer and I'll pay for the food and you know, we'll do it that way. The CEP project technically is led by it's a group of volunteers who all have paid jobs. And there's a project lead for each sub-project and then they have a monthly meeting of all of the whole project and then each of those sub-projects has a weekly meeting. And something that CEP does that I think is really interesting is they record all of their team meetings like it's a video meeting and they record it and they put it on YouTube and people watch them. Like I think that's awesome. But it helps them with the time zone problem to record the meeting and put it on YouTube. Yeah, one of the other things that I find really fascinating is many enterprise companies now, we know they're using open source but they're contributing to open source. I remember back the future of open source survey that was done is, I think it was like half of companies that were using it are also contributing. What do you see? We've talked to users at BitShow for many years as to why they see value and why they do it but would love to hear your take. So I do think companies are, they're using open source software but they're contributing and people talk about what you contribute the features that you want to see but I think you contribute to the things you find exciting and that you want to participate in. And contribution starts at like a very beginning level of just filing a bug report when you see it or coming to an event and going to the happy hour for that project. Seth and Gluster have won this afternoon. This afternoon. There's different get-togethers and you participate by meeting the people, telling them how you're using it, telling them what you'd like to see, what's cool. I think a lot of people in the open source worlds there's an opportunity for the developers to be very close to the users in a way that's harder and proprietary software and it's really exciting. Like if you're working on something and someone comes up and says, hey, I'm using it and here's what I like, it's fun. It's working. All right. How about career advancement? Everybody I know in the developer world it's like, well, Git really is your resume these days so got to imagine that just the skill set and the education is such a huge part for so many companies. Yeah and with more people getting paid to work on open source and they can show what they've worked on that it's not more common, it's very easy to move to another job taking your skill set with you and it's very valued and you even get to keep your community of people that you're working with as you move around and help different companies with that project. How do you divvy it up in a community where the workload is kind of equally shared or there's a fair share of work being done and you want to maybe some people have a different level of expertise and so there's some policing that kind of has to be done or I guess some responsibilities assigned or whatever. That could be a little delicate sometimes, can it that you want to get the right people doing the right things and you love willingness and enthusiasm but sometimes you do have to kind of decide are you going to work on this, we're going to work on that. So some projects have done a really excellent job of defining the roles and assigning them and having like a mentoring process to get new people there. So for example, Kubernetes on the release team there's like people that work on the release team and then if you're interested you raise your hand and you like work with the person that's in that role for like an entire release and so you get like a whole release to be mentored and taught and then the next year you're the person doing the release and you can mentor somebody else. So I think the process has helped with that and it's, I think there's some really great work being done there. You're building the farm team basically, right? You're bringing them along on training wheels to a certain degree and then let them ride the bike by themselves. Yep. Makes sense. So speaking of getting people ready there was something new announced this week that I'm hoping you can explain. It's the Red Hat Universal base image was explained to me that this is really a subset of rel or being well ready. What does that mean? How's that going to impact developers? Yeah, the idea is to help developers develop in containers on Linux and in a way that they can, so the UBI is based on rel. It's a subset of rel packages. It's a container so it's in the cloud space and that you can develop your app on it and then you can share that container with anybody whether or not they're a rel user so you can share it with anybody in the world to have them develop on it but then when you're done it is supported on rel and OpenShift so you can have full enterprise support for it. How does a show like this inject new blood, new perspective into what you do? As I would assume this is a pretty good recruiting opportunity too in a lot of respects and you stay pretty busy over this course of these three days meeting with a lot of new people, meeting a lot of new faces, getting a lot of new ideas. I mean how does this show kind of fit into what you're going to do the other 362 days of the year? Well we look forward to this show for 364 days a year so we're always planning for it and prepping for it. It adds energy, it adds excitement. We get to connect with people that are using the software. Hopefully they do come to the happy hours or down to the booth and talk to us and say here's how we're using it and we hope to get more people involved. People that are using software that want to learn about it get them more involved. Well you've done a great job of pulling the community together. We wish you continued success in doing that and thanks for the time today. If you're on theCUBE nice to have you. Thank you very much for having me. You've got Stormy Peters joining us from Red Hat. Back with more in just a little bit. You're watching the Red Hat Summit and you're watching exclusive coverage right here on theCUBE.