 Wait for a mic. There we go. Hi everybody Do you guys have fun at the party last night? Was everybody at the party or are those people the ones that aren't here yet? So, you know So I hope you had a good time I thought it was really fun the pinata was killer if you stayed that late and that was that was pretty cool And you know, of course Jacob's cloud costume So I just want to say thanks to the fun committee for putting on the party We'll do some more thanks and stuff the closing and moral of the story There is if you really want to have a great party in it get the interns to plan it exactly Works every time right so Just a reminder that the closing does have prizes. So, you know if you want to come by for that There is at least a Bluetooth speaker I think most of the rest of it is nowhere near as cool, but you know, hey, it's what I could gather So, you know, please stay for the closing, you know, please come to all the talks today. We really like to see you And we hope you're having a good conference so far Definitely let us know if you have any feedback good bad or indifferent that way we can do a better next year So that's the first part in the next part is We did board for lightning talks out in the ziskin lounge And so if we get some people who want to do some talks, we might have an empty slot again And so therefore we can just kind of throw up a new talk just for fun The Easter egg talk is being reprised and running again today It is hilariously funny. I was literally crying So I highly recommend trying to get to that you just have to figure out where it is and when It is in the schedule. It should be obvious because it does not sound like anything else I think that's it for the announcements but you know, we hope you're having a great time and Hugh's gonna do the intros for our keynote Thanks, Langdon. So I I've been working with been working for Chris right now for about nine months since I started here in Boston But I've been working with him since 2007 I think that sounds about right. We worked together on on Red Hat Zen, which was the virtualization of the future Turned out that was a bad bet, but We we had a great time. I think mostly a great time doing it and Chris has been not only a force in Red Hat, but a force in my life And also happens to be about the most laid-back person I've ever met Which is Kind of cool Suron by contrast, I've only known for about ten minutes However, I know of her as not only a talented interviewer and a force for Good and sanity in this bizarre world that we all work in But also as a really interesting and engaging speaker So I am really looking forward to having both of them share their thoughts with us and please welcome Suron and Chris How y'all doing today? I've never been described as a force before I love that put that on my resume put that on my LinkedIn Thank you all for coming really excited to see you all I heard you had a great party last night So kudos to you for showing up this morning. That is awesome. Go you Chris. Are you excited today? I Am on West Coast time zone Translation never been more excited Actually, I'm really bummed that I haven't been able to make much of DevConf translation none I'm in the process of moving I'm moving out here to Boston and as Exciting as that is it's totally diverted my attention away from being able to be here So this is my first experience at DevConf US and I hope to make the best of it So I think a good place to start is to figure out who's in the room So we're gonna do a little audience interaction. Yes. Yes, we go. Yes. Yes. Yeah Okay, okay, so show of hands if you are a student Raise them high raise my be proud of my out student of life. There you go like that Okay, show of hands if you consider yourself a open source contributor raise them high raise them high raise Okay, show of hands if you've contributed in the last six months. Oh Oh, my serious people. Oh my goodness. Okay last month. Oh My god, we're in trouble Chris. Oh, man. Okay. Very very exciting. All right So I think a good place to start is you are the CTO red hat which sounds very important and you've been I don't know what it sounds like Very impressive your chief very impressive and you have been a software developer for over 20 years How did you get started? My story is probably not that unusual I got started as a kid with a Gift from my grandfather, which was a Commodore a Vic 20. I really wanted the 64 But it was a little out of reach and I got excited about programming from that machine and As a kid also I had an opportunity to go to a couple of Courses that were taught at the local university, but we're aimed at kids just to learn basic basic programming and I Would say I got the bug there Although I didn't pursue it directly and it was a little indirect it was much later through school and I got reconnected through university where I got reconnected with computing and When I left school I studied physics and when I left school I Thought I have two choices. I could become a Physicist and be the person That knows everything about the thing that there's only three other people on the planet You can talk to you about also very impressive, which would be cool Yeah, I was I was I really struggled with this decision or I could just do something different and something different is what drew me and event eventually and that was largely about Unix and Computers were still something that I found a lot of interest in and even though the command line is arguably arcane somehow I found it intuitive and So I that's what I did I launched into computing out of university Deciding not to be the person that knows the thing that only three other people on the planet know something about Well, it's like it worked out Yeah Okay, so you When you first got introduced to coding did you understand that that could be a job? I had no idea I was 12 so I was like jobs didn't exist job to me a job was I thought Maybe being a garbage man would be really cool as pretty into the trucks and About the smell That's advanced thinking and then That was when I was younger and then by the time I was Playing with computers. I was much more interested in sports and I thought maybe just maybe I'd be a pro sports player I wasn't sure Exactly how because I wasn't good enough at any of the sports It just seemed like a fun thing to do. So you didn't have a sport in mind. No, I just had the concept and then So coding as a as a career was not obvious at all and it wasn't necessarily much of a thing at that point time There it was pretty niche still it was in university where I realized it was enough it was a thing and I Thought what a terrible sounding thing to do Sit at a desk all day long staring at a computer screen writing lines and lines and lines of code and then I Got into it Where did the time go, you know, well the interesting part is now you you travel all the time So you don't actually sit at a computer all day the way you think about it. We were going to that's right That's right. That's more recent so I did spend a lot of time in front of the keyboard and the thing that I the thing that I missed the most in the beginning was Pencil and paper because as a physicist you spend a lot of time with math and math equations And I loved the process of solving a problem and thinking about it But also writing it down and it took me about a year in my first job to get over not just working things out on pencil and paper and It took me about five years to get over not writing things on with pencil and paper So I'd write a lot of documents twice write it out and then type it in and today I It's the opposite. I'm you know keyboards are an extension of how I think and so it's yeah, it's quite different I'm a big fan of writing things down For me it's there's something about the process and it cements the idea in my head in a way that's different from typing Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So what did open source look like? 20 years ago when you first got started what was the land because nowadays I feel like it's so mainstream, right? Like everyone's in it heard of it pretends. They do like you do it. And so for you back then What was it actually like? What was that world like? I? Was exposed to one small corner. So I don't know what it was like in its entirety one corner was For those of you who ever use who were working on Unix machines and ever use SunSight SunSight was a place where you could get a bunch of awesome tools and many of those tools were open source tools Notably the the toolchain GCC and bin utils And shells you could get bash not this crappy Unix The Unix native whatever Unix variant you worked on Unix native shells tend tended to be a little bit behind behind the times corn shell Orange shell the shells themselves weren't the problem as the implementation with the Unix specific implementation so there was that and then I really first got started as a user of Linux. I had all these the job that I worked on we used Solaris both SunOS 4 and 5 so BSD and more AT&T derivative We used SCO Unix we used Dynix both Dynix and Dynix PTX which would be similar BSD and AT&T derivatives we used Unix and There might be one other there might be one other Unix derivative in there and Everything we did was with GCC. We didn't use any of the native toolchain on any of those platforms and All of those computers were expensive and they were either pizza box sized or refrigerator sized and none of those either size-wise or cost-wise fit in my basement and in my basement I had no shortage of x86 boxes and A friend of mine said you know you can get this thing. It's called Linux and you can run it on that x86 box And it'll feel like you're running Unix in your basement like Hallelujah, I don't have to steal a sun a spark box from work and risk getting in trouble And that's how I got involved that really as a user. It was not long after that that I Was responsible for the high availability of a platform as a telecommunications company and in that world five nines and ha is a really big thing and I Was I met a colleague who worked on this project called Linux ha and Linux ha was really my first experience and being a Linux developer or an open-source developer and The experience was really remarkable It completely changed my life. I mean honestly not not to be too kind of dramatic or hyperbolic, but it completely changed my life because Coding at that point in time was usually somebody bequeats you with this big document Written in somebody else's language describing a problem that you may or may not understand and Describing a way to solve the problem, which may or may not make sense And then your job is to take that description turn it into code and so it not a lot of creativity there necessarily and You're not necessarily understanding what's going on and and there's this sense of you know the omniscient being that knows everything and hands you the tablet and Being involved in an open-source community where I could just communicate with people who were really amazingly skilled in this area of high availability share some of my knowledge, but maybe more importantly expose my lack of knowledge in a way that Didn't feel so threatening. I don't know how to do this and people would just respond Have you tried this? Did you think of that and Ultimately, I was able to both learn and then contribute to the project and the contributions that I submitted were Eagerly welcomed and that whole process which in the beginning wasn't didn't take very long that whole process was Totally life-changing in the sense that I realized I could just get involved It was my own initiative that was all that was required to make an impact on the community and I could learn from Really the the some of the brightest minds in this field In a way that gave me a huge opportunity to kind of grow And that was the beginning of open source development for me. Yeah So when I first heard of open source or especially the community open source I heard not so nice things about it people are, you know, can be a little You know, just not they don't have a lot of time Now I'm not necessarily a lot of patience a lot of knowledge, but you know can be it can be a little mean sometimes When you were starting out were those issues that you had to deal with In that very beginning not necessarily it may have been a unique community smaller, so it's almost like well, there's another one Whatever we do to keep that person engaged. Let's do that It wasn't long after that that I got involved in the kernel community in the kernel community was much more abrasive and you had a Yeah, you just had a different way of engaging and and I definitely had points in time where You know if you could reach through the keyboard and throttle somebody would and or or conversely you just feel like that's been You've experienced that and you feel kind of abused And so that that that is a thing I would definitely not want to disagree that there's not a cultural element that can be abrasive and and part of it is time part of it is These are people and people have differing ways of working with each other a Big part of an open-source community for me is the human relationships and the trust associated with those human relationships And what's interesting about that? In your family, you're probably more rude to your parents or siblings or or children than anybody else around on the planet and that same kind of Safety of trust I could be an asshole to you and and it'll be fine afterwards. We'll go have beers or something and So there's a little bit of that and then also just people have different skill levels in terms of how they communicate with others and when you have extremely bright people Really passionate about their ideas. You're also engaging just that that passion like I'm I'm right and you're wrong And so there's there's a lot of different dynamics that are happening in one You know in that community context. Yeah, and I imagine the community is kind of forced to grow up a bit too Right the more mainstream it becomes more people it includes the you know when the more ideas are in the room You kind of have to be more accommodating. Have you seen any shifts in the culture? Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact in the Colonel community. We had some real issues you could pinpoint it to a few key people and so Who shall remain nameless Some of those people Behind the scenes were actually spoken to like a year behaviors is damaging to the entire project and And I'm not talking about me this year that was done in public But there were some folks who didn't even understand the degree to which their behavior was off-putting and hurting other people and So a little bit of just direct communication and saying you really need to think about how your How your voice impacts other people? I suspect that made a small impact because a lot of these are ingrained behaviors and then at the same time more at a kind of project level a Focus on how do we get more people involved if you look at a finite pool of people over time? There's going to be some attrition and If you have a finite pool with attrition That will approach a pool of zero over time And how do you keep onboarding new people and for two reasons one just to keep the critical mass and two You need to have fresh ideas It's really easy to get into an echo chamber and start getting stale ideas and You know we wanted the project to continue to grow and thrive and one of the big values of Linux specifically is that it's you know quarter century plus it's evolved with The technology landscape it's it's adapted to all of the changes. It's on all the you know I Normally it would be in my pocket although right now it's over on that chair It's on my phone and not empowering the world's largest supercomputers in that whole entire Spectrum of hardware that's enabled has changed over time. So continually evolving in a context We're also the software that's running is continually evolving. So Hugh and I worked on Zen Later KVM today a lot of focus in the industry around containers and all these contexts Linux is at the core And how do you keep evolving this project to stay relevant? It requires both code level changes, but also You know keeping the community fresh within people and new ideas and new requirements and new use cases and yeah if you have a Kind of a stiff arm policy to accepting newcomers and that's that's never gonna happen. Yeah, okay, so I want to switch gears a bit and talk about the Business model I guess of open source. I feel like recently or over time. It's become more and more Corporatized. Yeah, this is is a word we can use Especially just recently with Microsoft, you know buying github the largest platform for open source projects period is I think we're the biggest Symbols of you know things kind of moving in a more corporate direction. And I know you represent red hat Which is also a big company But how do you feel about that as an open source contributor someone who's been in the community for so long now? You work for a company company. How do you how do you navigate that? How do you think about that? It's complicated. There's the the first like my first response is We won Come on. I mean, that's awesome. We have been I've been at this for a long time and there is this sense of us against them and My t-shirt might even resemble that and and the us was the community and the them was proprietary software and Today so much of the the the economy has run through open source Direct developed software which is a huge huge huge major step forward for for open source communities The flip side of that is The part of how we've grown is through becoming mainstream and becoming part of this this this economy and that means there's a lot of Money that's infused into projects and that and with that money comes this Strings. Yeah, like there's definitely strings attached and it changes the incentives and so the You know one of the things that I care about is how can we retain the health and vibrancy of a community and the kind of community concept while embracing a whole set of new developers who are Corporate enterprise developers in the the growth of open source is into corporate culture And into products and running companies Many of the new full-time Developers are coming from corporations and making that accessible to to those developers making open source communities Accessible to those developers is really important. It's how we're going to continue to grow and get the diversity of use cases and people But we can't do that at the cost of sort of selling out the community concept and You know, there's definitely a faction within the community. That's very much just Counterculture and so that faction I think would not be would not feel like we've won would feel like we've sold out but Retaining that kind of core community principle I think is the hard part and one of the things that I've seen in the industry and I know many here have probably participated in this process is we have all of these organizations that support open source projects foundations and To me I sometimes refer to the foundation as corporatization of open source development and I Mean that Literally as well as tongue-in-cheek with the negative connotation that comes along with that And the literal piece is we really do have more corporate Input into the process and the Concern that comes along with that is where's the soul of the community and The governance process is put in place to make it comfortable for all these corporate entities to be involved because they don't know Any other way and if we didn't allow for that we wouldn't be including those Members into the community and if that's all that we have then we may lose mm-hmm the real core value of the community and so I think there's a balance and attention there and I see the value of Foundation and one of the things I worry most about is you Pool a lot of resources behind a project and with those resources. That's that's dollars It's funding those resources one of the major things the foundation can do for a project is market it and marketers are really good at marketing things and When you market a project independent of its maturity level You can really create miss that expectations for the industry and some of the things we've seen in the last five years Our projects that have huge marketing budgets get a lot of focus in the industry don't quite meet the expectations and then there's a lot of dashed hopes and and so You know, I think responsible thinking about what is What's the value of supporting a project which is mostly about the developers and the users? and Getting the right message out at the right time It's a tough balance. Yeah, I mean the docker project Didn't exist one day and sort of went viral the next day and really helped change the focus of the industry and There's something really cool about that and then there's all of the kind of Marketing corporate interests that can I don't know confuse some of the messaging. Yeah, it kind of makes me want to ask the question What is open source at its absolute core? I was I was in a room where there was this was being debated and a friend of mine sat next to me and she said You know all this debate about the open source community and the core Corporations and the people that's not what it is open source is purely about the license That's the whole thing the whole thing is just the license and and it's not really much more than that Yeah, so I was like and you know, she's a pretty big open source contributor And I thought really really that's how you how you look at it But it does make me wonder now that there's all these players that didn't exist before there's corporate input There's foundations. There are people who get paid to do it. There are people who are doing it You know nights and weekends What what does open source actually boiled down to in your opinion? it might be a Sort of a cliche word, but it's collaboration and The so the reason I don't think it's a license for one There's many open source licenses and they all have different subtle implications of how that license can be used so there's kind of the most restrictive open source license and the least restrictive open source license and the least Restrictive open source license allows you to take open source code and embed it in proprietary software And the most restrictive doesn't allow for that So I would just with that spectrum alone. I feel like that you can't define open source as them as the license To me, it's much more about the collaboration and most importantly about the contribution and the reason I think about the contribution is that same license spectrum which allows you to take code and Abscond with it May or may not be how a community treats the code that they're that they're working on so The community culture and the expectation for collaboration and contribution is independent of the actual license and it's the community culture and the collaboration contribution I think is open source. It's you know, your output is code that you're developing your community is developers and users and You're facilitating that with a license to a degree. You know, you can freely redistribute the code But it's not the license the license is more of a tool and and it's really important that GPL versus BSD and can I embed this in my proprietary code or not? Doesn't seem to be the driving force for how much people contribute back to a project It's more the community the culture of the expectation That that creates that and I think that's a really important distinction. So to me, it's that it's collaboration it's the contribution both code contributions as well as bug reports and documentation and You know users participating That's that collaboration and contribution are the key of an open source community So one thing that I was personally excited about with the Corporatization of open source is the money that goes with that right because I think we like to think that open source is Accessible to everyone but the reality is for a long time is it's accessible to people who already had good day jobs and could Afford to do a lot of really great work But to do it for free and now with foundations and funding and I'm outreach ease is a you know Great program that allows for people to actually get paid to do this work. Have you seen the the benefits in? diversifying the community and bringing in different people who may not be at that point of privilege where They could just kind of do it for free Yes Absolutely, I hope it the numbers are still small. I'd love it to be bigger But I was I read an article recently and it was the premise of the article was Just go learn that language and then you can get involved in a project that is written in that language Implicit in that is an assumption of That you have the free time to go learn the language and that there is some kind of Privilege that comes along with that and The focus that I see in the industry right now is not just only on the code and the foundations but also I'm trying to be more broadly inclusive and Knowing that our communities won't thrive survive and thrive without more diverse inputs is probably the first you know knowing is half the battle and and Some of the work that we've done to help we can improve the Diversity and inclusion within communities is all over the map from here. We've been able to bring some new members to the community Through funding and scholarships here at dev comp, which is awesome So I know there's some folks here that are they're been able to take advantage of that and we're really excited about bringing in new new contributors Many of the foundations actually have scholarship programs that try to incorporate people into the community through Largely conferences and getting people to travel because that's where you meet and have the high bandwidth face-to-face Communication which is unique compared with digital communication and If you look at some of the statistics There's they're not that awesome frankly I I saw Marina put together some numbers for me and one of the things that stood out was a survey of the github community The Diversity levels are really really really low And then if you look at some other communities are a little higher So it's like 3% in github and roughly 10% in communities like the kernel and In any case that's low But that 3% number really struck me and and even internally at red hat our internal numbers aren't that aren't that high And so what we need to do as an industry and with what we're doing within red hat is look at that and where are your biases? What can we do to not create barrier?