 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in San Francisco, California at Moscone West is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host with my co-sense, John Troyer, co-founder of Tech Reckoning and as an analyst firm and community development advisory. Our next guest is Stormy Peter, senior manager, community leads at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you too. Thanks for having me. So obviously the success of open source is grounded in community. We love talking about community and there's a lot of new things happening, new dynamics that are somewhat similar to what's in the past but a new generation is coming into open source. It's clear by the growth. I mean, go to any event, just at the Linux Foundation event, Jim Zelen is always at the slide up. Exponential growth, more code coming in. So, you know, you have to trot out all the ethos, contribute, be part of a project. And so the lines are still there, but it's evolving. And what's your thoughts on it as it grows? I'm looking at the big ecosystem here, growing at Red Hat, more contributors, more projects, more products. Yeah, we definitely have, the communities are growing and we have more participation in all the projects across the board. And I think one of the things that's interesting is the projects that we're working on are things that one person can't develop or use all on their own. We're talking like software defined storage, we're talking open stack, big solutions. And so companies are paying people to work on them. And I think over the last 10 years that's been the really big difference. I talked to Dirk at VM, we was heading up all their open source and we were just in Copenhagen. And he was reiterating and reminding me because I found myself falling into the trap. And a lot of new companies that come into open source, I'm going to get people involved in a product. Going to join that project so we can commercialize the project versus commercialize their offering and being part of a project. So Dirk when I were talking and he was emphasizing language is everything. Language defines behavior and that the project is an open contributed project. People work on it. The product that's commercialized is different. And this is not new to Red Hat but it's worth just re-amplifying some of the language as new people come in. Your thoughts on this. Yeah, so Red Hat were really clear on what's upstream, what's the open source version that everyone is working on together and then what's the version that we're supporting for our customers? And they have the same code base, they have the same features but the upstream version we call a project and the downstream version we call a product and sometimes they're even branded differently. For example, ManageIQ is the upstream project and CloudForms, Red Hat CloudForms is the downstream product. And that's where the action is for Red Hat to commercialize and for productize. For productize, yeah. And get all around it but then they contribute everything back upstream. Everything's developed upstream. So you and the other community managers, are you at Red Hat? It's a little bit different, right? The open source way and open source ethos. So you do have these open source communities as well as user communities. Are you involved with, I mean, how do you meld the two? How do you differentiate the two in the context of Red Hat, if I'm a Red Hat customer? Yeah, so they're all the same or overlapping. So usually you'll have a core group of contributors some may be Red Hat employees, some may work at another company that's either a user company or a partner company, some may be individuals working on it and that's kind of your core base. But then you have people that are participating, watching very carefully, maybe contributing once in a while that are watching that and then you have users. So they're not separate groups of people, they're overlapping groups of people. That's great. In terms of community here at the show, once you have community, that's 365, right? You come to an event and it's kind of like homecoming. So how has the experience been this year for you at Red Hat Summit with the Red Hat community, people coming together, community activities, that sort of thing? It's a really great place to bring people together. So we have all of our customers, we have contributors and everyone is on the floor talking. So we're in community central here in the floor and our booth has been full of people all day long even when they announced that it's closing, there's still people around and talking. And we have everything from customer events where we talk to customers about how we work on upstream to actually that we've had contributor meetups where everyone gets together and meets all their fellow contributors in person. How do you guys handle the growth? Because with growth you have still new ideas coming in. So you want to keep an open inclusive environment. Is there any new things you guys are doing that make sure all the best ideas are being surfaced up or is it the same program that seems to keep going that way? So I think the best projects evolve over time. So we're always looking at the governance of our project and does it fit where that project is right now. So when a project first starts out, it might have a benevolent dictator and then later when it has more contributors and more companies involved, you might evolve to a board or to a technical group. So for example, Gluster, we just graduated to a group of maintainers that make decisions as opposed to just a project lead. Is there like a norm or is there a certain pattern that averages for the programs? I mean, the projects having certain format that you've seen that works best or is it more ad hoc based on who's involved? It's a little ad hoc, but I think most of them start with a very strong personality who has a vision. And so a lot of them start either as benevolent dictators or as someone who's the main project lead. And then as they grow bigger over time, you end up with more of a voting membership board of directors style. So like Apache. And then now today, there's a lot of foundations involved too, right? Some things are in the red hat orbit more closely. Other three, you know, like we were just at KubeCon. So the, all the Linux foundation different to the, for instance, the Kubernetes, the CNCF, as well as stuff like, you know, the Cloud Foundry and OpenStack Foundation. So I mean, can you talk a little bit about the role of foundations now in modern community and social open source? Yeah, I think it's part of this evolution from all the contributors we're working as individuals, which they still are, to companies being able to pay for people to work on these projects. And so the companies want to not just give people time to these projects, they also want to donate money and pool their resources to do joint marketing or to push Kubernetes forward. And so organizations like the CNCF, the Linux foundation enable those companies to work together more effectively. The CNCF's done a good job of balancing. I mean, they got a lot of logos. I mean, a lot of people paying them money. So there's a commercial aspect, but they've been very transparent about, they're trying to create a great core community and they've separated the technical steering committee from the membership, which is smart. Most of the foundations are really good about leaving the technical steering committee to work as it's worked well in open source and then having the companies pool their money for marketing or for filling in the holes where they're not getting volunteers. Start. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Well, Stormy, I just wanted to extend the governance conversation a little bit to culture as well. I mean, we're in an interesting place again, in 2018 in our bigger culture. Those of us who've been involved in online culture and online communities, we know the ways these things can go wrong and we've seen it. How do you as an individual and your team develop and foster an inclusive and participatory culture in the communities of Red Hat? I think you said we've all seen things go wrong, but I think we also have a lot of experience now about how to foster the culture that we would like and how to include people. So you're seeing a lot more efforts. I mean, most of the online communities are pretty nice places to hang out these days and you're seeing a lot of effort to make sure there's code of conducts for the projects, that there's code of conducts for the events that people are welcome. There's a diversity event tomorrow here. So I think we're seeing a lot more inclusiveness and a real effort to bring people in. You guys attract a younger demograph that we were talking earlier with Denise. And because of its open source, you got academic. You can go into high school is seeing everything from robotics clubs to coding early on. So you get, Red Hat's getting them early and so she made it kind of, we're going to grow our own talent. So, you know, kind of tongue in cheek, but you guys have access to a lot of the younger developers. Any commentary on the orientation? Obviously there are a lot of mission driven, the younger folks love mission driven and tech. But is there any kind of new school kind of concepts you're seeing coming from the young guns that are coming up through the ranks? So I recently had a chance to speak to a classroom full of college students and I was really impressed. Like they knew what open source was. They were familiar with licenses and they all wanted to like make their app or make money, but they were really focused on humanitarian causes at the same time. And so I was really impressed with that. I want to do well on my career, but I want to make a difference in the world and a better place on that. I was really exciting to see. And now more than ever, you were the global footprint. We just had UNICEF on earlier here, Red Hat Labs doing some pretty cool things around, you know, code for good. So I think that's cool. The challenge we're seeing is that, okay, as enterprises come in, the continued balance, it's always been the case. You don't want the big one vendor coming in throwing their weight around. And we're seeing, like even with Java, you know, which is Oracle, Java E, might as Oracle, seeing movement, that's kind of opening up. So it seems the business model seems to be pretty clear, opens winning. We certainly think so at Red Hat. Like the best model is to be open. What's it like to work here? It's a really awesome place to work. I love all the people that I work with. Everyone, Red Hat really takes the open source culture, not just to its code base, but also to the culture that it has within the organization. And decisions are made openly, discussed openly. Everyone gets input. Everyone doesn't always get to vote, but everyone gets to have a say and is listened to. And it's a great place to work. Technical culture as well, obviously techies. Very technical too. As the ecosystem grows, right, there's obviously a lot more participants in the community. And so if a company wants to get involved, either say like in the Kubernetes community, or in the OpenShift community, what's the right way for a company to come in and participate in that kind of a community? And maybe what are some wrong ways? If a company wants to get involved in the community, I think the first thing they do is find them online. Are they on IRC talking? Are they on Slack talking? Join the mailing list. Go to whatever events are local to you, your local meetups. Just go to the big events if you can. And just put people on it. People that know what you're trying to do with it and can contribute, you know, either with getting started documentation or with bug reports. Yeah, I think it does have to come down to the people. You have to send actual people in. It can't be some sort of corporate motion. And in some ways, community is all about people and making connections. It's absolutely about people. I'm sorry, talk about your experience this year, Redhead. So obviously the numbers are bigger. They're getting great, the company's getting great reviews from financial analysts. OpenShift has been very popular. Some of the policy this is with Kubernetes has been phenomenal. OpenStack's got a bunch of life into it. You're seeing separation. Clear visibility now on how things are kind of clicking together on the app side. CoreOS is in. It's just interesting, right? This is Redhead's kind of going to a whole other level. What's the conversations like here inside the hall? People who aren't here watching didn't have a chance to come. What's the main conversations? The chatter, what's been the focus? So in the community central booth, I think the focus has been on how things work together, like how our different products work together and how you can use them together. As well as like, how do I follow along? Like how do I participate? If I want to know where RDO is going, where do I go to be part of it? What's the coolest thing you've heard here at the show that you could share, story? Oh, the coolest thing I've heard. I don't know if I have a moment, but it's just been all the conversations and like the fact that there's people flowing through all the time. It's like standing room only in the booth because people want to talk. There's a lot of action. A lot of face-to-face engagement, all right? Oh, I do have a story. So we had, we taught these, these red hat went to Boston and taught these middle school girls how to make cameras out of open hardware and open source software. Has anyone talked to you about this? No. And so they made these cameras and then we flew a couple of them out here and they taught a group of people here at the event on Monday how to make so these 11 year olds, 12 year olds taught them how to make cameras out of open hardware and open source software. And I was talking to one of them about what was different about teaching it. That was probably my favorite moment. It's hard to be a teacher when, yeah, you got to know the material. But that's paying it forward. That's the open source ethos. That's what we're talking about. Sorry, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. Great to see you again. Congratulations on all the success. And again, the community's buzzing. You guys are doing great and exciting. So thanks for coming on, Sharon. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, John Furrier. Stay with us. Day two coverage continues for three days of coverage after the short break. Be right back.