 Hey, hi everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening Wherever you are calling in from One of the beauties of virtual Conferences like the open source strategy summit is that you can join from anywhere I'm Nithya Ruff and I had the open source program office at Comcast And I also chaired the Linux Foundation board and I want to talk to you about a very important topic. Most companies are nowadays establishing an open source program office and I want to Convince you by the end of the presentation why you need to do more than compliance In your program office in order to get the most out of your investment in open source You can follow me on Twitter at Nithya Ruff and if you have any questions during my presentation Please feel free to ask me on the chat function and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have So let's get started Just to introduce myself I Characterize myself in a number of different ways or there are so many different aspects to each of us, right? One of the the aspects that I'm very proud of is that I'm a tech woman I started in computer science and as a developer and I continue to be someone who works in technology and believes in technology and Is an advocate for technique woman in technology? I am a huge believer in the power of open source and collaborative development and and collaboration as a means of innovation and I lead that at Comcast and I Encourage that in the organizations that I mentor I'm also a board member of the Linux Foundation also of a number of other boards. I am an advisory member there and I Really believe that as a leader you need to be an inclusive leader. We are a global world and we are a connected world and You bring out the best in people when you truly value and include them in everything you do So you can see the organizations that I'm most closely affiliated with today So let's move to the topic at hand To me moving to open source, especially as a company is Not just a switch, you know, you just turn on the switch and you're all of a sudden an open source Company or savvy with open source or working with open source You really are on a journey to open source and we'll talk about why and the journey is often never complete As open source evolves as the company evolves its business evolves You are always working towards, you know more and more engagement in open source One of the first ways companies get involved is making that transition if you will from being very dependent upon vendors to actually starting to develop software themselves and in the course of developing that software they start consuming open source software So let's talk about some of the activities that happen when you move In your journey from dependency to consumption So when you're dependent upon vendors You really look to the vendors for roadmaps for updates on what features are coming out next It's often a black box until you kind of hear about the roadmaps You spend a good chunk of money on your commercial license for that's perpetual a subscription You are highly reliable relied on vendors if you will for features function support Direction etc and that direction may not always align with the direction that you want to go And you're just one of many customers. So it's hard to convince, you know a vendor to change direction because of you Of course, you don't get access to the source code very often and You are operating the vendor solution. You're not creating it or customizing it or changing it So many companies Say in the last 20 years have started seeing open source come into the company sometimes from the bottoms up Where developers bring in open source into their solutions or you can even find it coming in through vendor solutions because vendors are using open source libraries or components and Open source also is very mature in many different areas of technology And there's a lot of open source options available In in the industry to choose from so all of this plus the fact that There's an initial perception that open source is free and cheap or less expensive And so you find that Companies start consuming open source and it starts coming into the company from an from a consumption perspective So let's discuss The fact that companies also feel that open source is moving at such a rapid pace in so many different areas especially infrastructure that they Feel that it not only helps them cut cost, but it speeds the innovation process and it helps them stay Competitive in fact today it is table six if you don't consume open source you are losing out on a competitive advantage because everyone else in the industry that you play in may be using open source and There by getting the advantages of using open source So let's go to the next stage, which is okay now you've started consuming open source and it typically leads to compliance What does that mean? When you use open source one of the conditions of using that open source is that you respect the licenses that are associated with open source software the price of Using open source if you will is that you comply with the Obligations that the license includes So legal teams often get involved once consumption starts getting to be quite prevalent in the organization And legal teams often have questions on are you using it correctly? Are you linking it correctly to our proprietary software? Are you using permissive licenses or copy love licenses and Are you tracking those licenses? Are you making sure that the community that you're taking that license so that software from is a healthy community? Which means that it is an active community that it has a lot of work going on It's keeping up with security. It's keeping up with engagement of developers It's not just you know one person Supporting it and if that one person goes away then the health of the community suffers of the project has to shut down So you find that a legal starts getting involved in both guidelines around what you use How you use it how you link it and then if you're actually Distributing the product that you're using it in outside the company legal gets involved in really defining how you Present the disclosure notice or the bill of materials to your customers because that is an obligation That's triggered when you start distributing your software so inevitably companies have to do compliance and It frankly respects open-source norms if you're getting something from someone The least you can do is respect the conditions with which they provide that software And it also helps you mitigate risk in the way you use it the way you link to it the way you track it etc and It becomes a must-do so organizations feel If they consume they have to comply and that's a good thing Compliance is always good The next step is a little harder so company is complying But there really is no motivation to contribute back. In fact Culturally, it's hard for companies to think about why should I contribute back? It's Something I created if they make some customizations for example or they create new features and functions They often think of it as a competitive advantage their IP and That if they contribute it that they will be Advantageing someone else particularly competition So there's often a cultural kind of aversion to contribution plus it takes a lot of time To package it correctly into a patch Working with the community making sure it gets accepted and understanding the community that you're working with its Norms and the way you need to contribute So there's a lot of fiction to contribution And there's a lot of slowness to contribution so many Organizations don't even contribute But what I'd like to say is contribution is critical contribution is important and you need to do it For the following reasons it reduces technical debt So if you're making changes if you're customizing your software It really is important that you mainline it or you upstream that contribution So that you're not bearing the burden of all of those changes and you're missing out on some of the innovation That happens in the main line and You're missing out on security patches and other alerts that come out if you are a Branch and if you're kind of veered away from the main line So from a technical debt perspective, it totally makes sense for a company to upstream The changes that they make and constantly make sure that they are in line with the main Branch and they get the benefits of the main branch that reduce the cost of their support So no business case wise it just totally makes sense that they spend the time to do it The second reason you need to upstream you need to contribute back is In open source you earn trust you earn credibility you earn influence Through the amount of contribution that you make to the project So if you are just consuming and just being absent and not engaging with that community You're not in the mailing list. You're not, you know weighing in on direction or Contributing code or contributing Financially or otherwise you really lose your seat at the table and influence and many of us as companies need to Make sure our commits are accepted You know in a smooth way and we also sometimes need to Argue and convince the rest of the project that they need to move in a certain direction so influence is important and Being at the table is important and often that comes with contribution And I also want to mention that If we keep taking and never giving back to open source open source will die open source will go away And so from a sustaining of open source that very Golden the goose if you will that lays the golden egg that we all consume You do need to contribute back You do need to make sure that it is healthy and it continues right it benefits us all and Contribution can be of any kind. You don't have to always do core contributions. You can do money. You can do evangelization You can do documentation. You can participate in the governance. You can be an advisor to the project So you really can do a lot of things from a contribution perspective So to conclude what I want to say is The value you get from open source really increases with contribution and The success of open source relies on companies not just consuming but being active participants and Contributing to open source Now let's discuss how you can go even beyond contribution Many companies these days are starting open source projects themselves. So they may create something that works for them It may be an original piece of work and by releasing these projects to open source They enrich open source. They make it Available for other companies and others in the open source community to use it and they advance If you will the technology in in different ways and and from a strategic perspective for the company itself There's a lot of advantages to releasing an open source project Let's I mean the softer advantages of thought leadership for example or recruiting Developers because they're attracted to the good work that you're doing. They're really important reasons But you can also set a standard so in a certain space if you feel that there are many different variable Ways to do something you can standardize on one way of doing it Which is perhaps the way that you do And you rally the community around that standard And thereby you kind of create an advantage for yourself through creating a standard that's influenced by you You can build an ecosystem around an SDK a software development kit or an API So if you need to onboard partners, you need to onboard community to a certain interface There's nothing better than open sourcing it and having them consume it and use it in their products You can also commoditize a space if there is a dominant dominant, you know proprietary Vendor or solution in a certain space You can influence a reduction of the price for that particular product for example through open sourcing a competitive solution or backing a competitive solution and Sharing your experience, you know many of us for instance, my company does networking at scale does Entertainment and content distribution at scale so by sharing production ready and High quality production quality Software you really are helping others improve their practices and improve how they do software So to me this is a stage where you start unlocking even more strategic value from open source And some of the leading companies in open source really do this But it's us we do some of this at Comcast We've released our Apache traffic control server We've released and collaborated with other companies on a common stack for Setup boxes and for other things in the cloud native space A lot of other companies do this very very actively Let's talk about Nirvana or the kind of one of the final stages if you will of achievement Or something that's an outcome that we all look for Which is how do you then change the culture of development inside your organization? An open source program office in particular can very systematically help you do that Transform the development culture transform how we do talent acquisition retention development how we work with procurement how we work with legal marketing communications and and Development fundamental development practices itself and the culture of collaboration inside a company Is something that an open source program office can certainly lead and coordinate and help create And I think open source program offices also really help companies To coordinate better both inside and outside the company and make open source more intentional And more organized So to me The best impact the highest value can be got if you move to the culture change stage And you really create a culture of collaboration Coordination leading an organized and intentional work in open source Then you look at this survey from the to-do group which is talk openly develop openly an Organization in the Linux Foundation that helps companies start open source program offices Helps give you a venue if you will for sharing practices across open source program offices You find that technology companies for sure are high adopters of the Ospo But companies like Comcast which are telecoms and communication and media Are also building open source program offices But you can see finance is one of the fastest growing areas for program offices in the industry It went from 28% to 47% from 2019 to 2020 So it's a practice. That's I think very valuable for financial institutions You also find that Often the open source program office can be located in many different places But in my experience, it's best Located or reporting structure to be in the software engineering and development Organization or in the CTO function because it's all about developer advocacy developer relations culture change of development and It belongs there. It's easier to create transformation In the development organization than to coming in from the outside Telling development to change culture and you really need to understand the development culture inside your company before you can advocate change I've seen it in legal. I've seen it in marketing, but I think It's most effective than it is in engineering or in CTO Um number of people in an open source program office varies You can do it part-time. You can have someone doing it part-time if you're a small organization all the way to you know 35 40 50 people in an organization It also depends upon the scope of the Ospo if the open source program office is only doing a marketing or contributions, but not the compliance function It may be smaller but if it's doing the breadth of what open source program offices can do then it tends to be a larger and You find that the longer the open source program office is in a company the more Successful the more value it gets the more traction it gets the more respect it gets in an organization And it becomes a very critical function in an organization At Comcast we've been in place for four years and I must admit that it is a very critical Organization in the company. It's highly supported from the executive team From our developers and from our managers and it's it's become a part of our culture and how we work and how we develop So, you know, I just wanted to kind of summarize With the fact that I work in Comcast We are no longer a cable company who's vendor dependent. We are very much a transformed company We are in the technology business. We use technology to serve our customers better to Interact better with our customers in a digital way We create platforms and applications using software particularly open source software We highly lean into open source and we care deeply about customer experience Which drives our desire to touch and Digitize and transform our software products so that we can serve our customers better And we went through the same stages we went from a vendor dependency in 2006 To consumption around 2011 We started contributing as early as then And you know, we started creating an open source advisory body There was a lot of part-time folks if you will who supported the company from an open source perspective and Around 2014-15 the company really came to a conclusion that we were doing so much open source We were doing it so much at scale and we wanted to be transformed We wanted to get the best impact from our investment in open source And so we established an OSPO and I came on board to help build that OSPO and we have a very thriving and Very engaged very active open source program office in the company That's working on everything from process to compliance to community building to evangelizing and culture change and it's been In my opinion helped the business value increase With great engagement. So the investment that we've made in open source is really paying off From speed to market to cost reduction to culture change better development practices Better technical branding better recruiting etc And you can find a lot of the projects that we've open sourced as a company in a comcast.github.io You will find a variety of things that we kind of house here One we have an innovation grant that we often give to organizations that apply for the grant It is open source projects. Its university is doing research in areas that we deeply care about So we feature that here so that open source projects can actually apply We also feature Projects that we have open sourced and you can get involved in becoming a contributor to those projects here It's nicely categorized and easy to find an infrastructure project versus a front-end project Etc. We also house all of the talks all of the Podcasts all of the articles we have done on open source It gives you a sense of you know Culturally and philosophically how we think about open source Why from a business perspective? We think it makes sense for us to support open source And why we enjoy being a part of the community You can also find a contact. So you want to make it really really easy for people to contact us Should there be a question should there be an issue that they want to escalate or raise with us? and we've been also doing blogs on some of our new projects and some of the Events that we've attended and talked to I want to briefly talk about metrics It's very important to measure the effectiveness of your open source program work So that you can continue to communicate business value to your executive team But also show that you're aligned with business objectives of the company and helping the company achieve its business objectives I measure the following things One is I want to know that the investment in the open source program office is being effective And that our processes and practices are effective. So the effectiveness of the Organization called open source program office itself is important The second area is community effectiveness. How effective are we In the communities that we participate in how at what level are we engaging are we contributing What type of influence do we have what community should be be even you know participating in project effectiveness really addresses Of the projects that we open source how effective are we in maintaining those projects? How many stars are we getting are we getting external contributors working in the project? Is this project healthy? Do we have the right setup for engagement and culture and inclusion? Talent recruiting is a really huge byproduct if you will of open source So we want to track Our people coming into the company because they like how we work in open source and that they can work in open source If they come into the company. So we look at that. We also look at From a promotion and a career perspective Are you doing open source? So for example in our technical ladder one of the criteria for promotion is Are you contributing back to open source? Are you volunteering in some way with the open source program office? Are you Speaking at conferences Are you being a thought leader in open source and all of these things help build the case for you? To move up the technical ladder if you will to distinguish to engineer fellow, etc An engagement from a marketing and communications perspective is something else we measure We look at the number of events we attend the number of blogs we post Sponsorship we do what's kind of the perception of the developer audience in Comcasts community engagement and sometimes it's difficult to measure business impact But we would like to and we continue to work hard to say What business impact did open source make on the company? Did it help us get to market faster? Did it cut costs? Did it improve reliability? And so I continue to work hard to measure the business impact I want to conclude this presentation by saying that open source is really a key part of our innovation And should be a key part of any company's innovation And you really need to move past consumption and compliance if you want to get maximum Benefit from your investment in open source So I hope I've convinced you of the journey you can take the value Return that you can get as you get more and more involved in open source And I'm happy to address any questions you have And also to help be a mentor To your organization on your journey to open source Thank you and have a wonderful day