 So we are here at the open source leadership summit at the beautiful town of Sonoma, California. What are we doing inside? We should be outside, right? I know. The weather is so good. It's so awesome. It was raining in the morning. I was planning to do interviews outside, but it was raining, so I moved inside. But let's not get into there. So first of all, Nithya, I mean, I haven't known you forever. Yes. But just for the sake of our audience, can you quickly introduce yourself? I'm happy to. So Nithya Ruff and I'm the head of open source practice at Comcast, which is at the intersection of media and technology and you're a well known company in the U.S. I also sit on the board of the Linux Foundation as a member at large or a director at large, which means that I'm not representing a company, but I'm representing the community. So what is your role at Comcast? So my role at Comcast is to lead the open source practice for the company. What that means is to more systematically and in a scalable fashion, introduce open source culture and open source engagement inside the company. So Comcast for a very long time has been working with open source. Even before I came, which was about a year and a half ago, Comcast created an open source project called the Apache Traffic Control Server. They've contributed things like speed test JS and numerous projects to open source, but it was happening organically and part time with lots of people getting involved. And we felt as a company that we had reached a tipping point where we needed a focused office which would develop competency around open source in the company and transform the company in terms of open innovation. You mentioned a couple of projects that Comcast has been. So is it that they created these projects and then open source them? And in addition to these projects, are you also involved with other open source projects? Absolutely. We created the Apache Traffic Control Server, which is a content distribution network. And essentially, we looked in the market for something similar and we found some proprietary products, but they didn't quite have the functionality we needed. So a number of years ago, we decided to create our own and we open sourced it and then we contributed it to the Apache Foundation. And it's been incubating at the Apache Foundation and it has more than just Comcast as contributors. And we also use that in our production. So it's something that comes back inside the company. Another area that we created a project for example was it's called the reference design kit or RDK. Many people have set up boxes in their homes and also routers which help them get high speed internet from Comcast as well as the cable services. What's inside those boxes is the open source software which we've created called the RDK kit. So we created a project called the RDK project and many, many members of the cable industry are members as well as OEMs as well as SOC vendors like Intel and Broadcom. And this really revolutionized the way set up boxes and customer premise equipment was created. In the old days it used to be very proprietary. It took a very long time to update it or introduce new features. And then people would throw it over the wall. The SOC vendor would create their BSV or SDK and then that would go to the OEM who would then create the box and then would come to ISVs. We've completely changed that process to be a very nimble and agile process because everyone's working on the same software code. Those are two really good examples of projects that Comcast created which really changed pieces of that industry. In terms of projects we depend upon or are involved in, we clearly consume a ton of different projects. In open source everything from big data to AI to networking projects to cloud projects. A couple of examples of projects we consume and are very involved in are Cloud Foundry which sits under the Linux Foundation umbrella as well. I think these days everything sifts under Linux Foundation umbrella. Exactly. It seems that way because it's a good home. So Cloud Foundry, we are very, very involved in that. Greg Otto who's our executive director in that space plus his team use it to help developers inside the company to be able to deploy their applications very, very quickly. We also use the Yocto project which is an embedded Linux project under the Linux Foundation umbrella and that's the foundation if you will and the build system for our RDK project. So it allows us to use a common build system across from SOC vendors all the way down the supply chain to collect all of the packages that are needed to create a setup box. A couple of other projects clearly we use a lot of Apache Foundation projects like Spark and Cassandra. We are also now members of the CNCF project. What else do we open chain from a compliance perspective? We use OpenStack inside the company for some private cloud work and tons of tools. We are a huge GitHub shop and we have one of the largest GitHub installations, I think. You're using a lot of open source technology at the same time your developers are contributing to a lot of projects. While it's all open source, compliance and licensing becomes a big issue. So what kind of processes are there within Comcast to kind of empower developers so that they can freely either use or contribute to the... And that's a very, very good question because to me compliance means that you respect the license that the developer developed the software from and we get a lot of benefits and privileges in using open source software. So we feel that we need to abide by some of the obligations that come with the license as well. And my team is responsible for compliance in the company. But even before my team was formed, it was a legal team actually who created an open source advisory council. They were very forward looking. They created this council whose job it was to define policies and also to approve any requests for contributions that came inside the company. The challenge was that it wasn't scaling fast enough with the amount of requests we were getting as a company. And so legal was constantly getting requests directly from developers. And one of the benefits of having an open source program office as you know is that we act as an advocate for developers and we act as a first line of support if you will for developers. So what we've done as a team is we've automated the entire process of requesting for contribution. People just have to go to Jira, fill out a form and they say I want to either upstream some bug fix or a patch or they say I have a brand new project I've created, I want to put that into the open source. And then my compliance manager basically approves things online if it's a very small contribution. If it isn't she sets up a meeting with the legal team, engineering team all at the table. And we do a 20 minute review of the developer's request. He or she will describe the request to us. And once they leave we immediately as a team in a closed meeting we say is this something we want to approve? It's approved and then we send them instructions for how to set up their project. So it's as quick as that. Just to give you some stats we try to do a quick turnaround within 10 days if it's a major project. If it is a patch or bug fix it happens almost immediately as soon as they file we can approve it. 96% of everything people submit we approve. We're not throttling back or holding back. And the process has improved so much that from 2013 when we had only 13 requests for contribution to now we got 110, 115 requests last year. Throughout the year? Throughout the year. Which isn't much compared to say an Intel or others. But in our line of business Intel needs to prepare a software ecosystem prior to chip arrival. In our ecosystem it's not as critical. How do you encourage your developers to actually go out and participate in more open source projects? This process is I think when you're officially using a Comcast site then you have to go through this process. But other than that they can freely come to these events like that or just engage with the community. Do you have anything to encourage? Absolutely. And then just one more comment on the compliance process because it's relevant to this question is the philosophy I've taken is that we want to reduce fiction to engagement with open source whether you're contributing or consuming. And we also don't want to be the end of line inspection. We want to help them build it into their daily thinking. Just like DevSecOps, you can call it DevSecOpenOps or something. You can coin as many. It gives many, many inserts into that phrase. So the approach is to guide, mentor, encourage, create an environment where they feel that the company cares. So one example of how we encourage people to get involved in open sources, most companies in their technical ladder for becoming a fellow or distinguished engineer generally go by the number of patents filed or papers published. So this year and last year we changed it to also say, is this person now being accepted into an open source project? Has he become a maintainer? Has he open sourced something? Is he being invited to be a speaker or she being invited to be a speaker? So we are acknowledging open source contributions as part of the promotion for an engineer. We are trying to do a rotation program in the open source advisory council where engineers can come and sit on the council as one of the approvers so that they can get trained in open source thinking. How do you balance business and open source? How do you balance IP and open? We encourage, we constantly post call for papers for different conferences on our Slack channel so that people can go out and speak about their projects. We have an ambassador program which means that there's open source advocates throughout the company in different locations can join us and be part of the open source practice and be the eyes and ears in that location and go evangelize open source in that location be a point of contact for people. That allows us to scale also as an OSB because we are just three of us and we are three women's office by the way. So we run almost a 10,000 developer organization which is our technology and customer experience and product group. The last thing I'll say is we've just made it so easy. We have a central site where all information is hosted for open source and they can go see it, go check it out. You know, things like our policies, conference calendars, who to contact for questions and then we help them write blogs, we help them promote their community, we help them brand their project with icons and stickers and all that other stuff. So we are a full service shop from compliance all the way to community strategy to marketing and guidance. You mentioned Spark. So these days machine learning is a very interesting use case and in what capacity is Comcast kind of using machine learning? Can you talk about that a bit? Sure. The group that I sit in is called Technology Product and Customer Experience. So customers are at the heart of everything we do and yes, we have a long way to go to transform our customer experience so we take that very, very seriously. And one of the ways you transform customer experience is using AI. It's in a number of ways. One is in reliability and in predictive maintenance and making sure that we reduce the number of truck rolls and that we catch problems before they happen. So we use that in our customer support analysis. The second is in how we transform how you search for content on your setup box, how you use the content, recommendations, that sort of thing. So we're making, I don't know if you've used the voice remote, the X1 voice remote has transformed the way customers are now viewing their content on their Xfinity box. So instead of having to memorize all the different channels and which channel to go to, I keep surfing. I have Comcast, but I prefer app more because I am like more mobile than sitting for TV, but yeah, I have... The voice remote? Yes, I have used it. It's completely changed people's experience because you can now say, I want to watch Game of Thrones. You're not worried about bad AI, but what if you say, I want to watch Game of Thrones and the AI say, no, you cannot watch it right now. Well... Or you just call them and say, no, your line is fine. And no, maybe we don't take over, right? We have heard so many stories with Alexa and everybody, so you cannot trust AI too much. No, I mean, yeah, exactly. But so it helps us improve customer experience through training it on voice recognition, on natural language phrases that customers use, et cetera. And so we're constantly kind of looking at the data and seeing how we can refine and make the experience better. So customer support is one area. This is another area. The third is in our home security product, really doing visual recognition and alarms. That's more like IoT also, right? It is IoT, exactly. It's cameras in the house plus being able to act on data at the edge rather than coming back to the cloud and making decisions and event-driven actions. In addition to this, there's machine learning also, because when you're running the software, it can also help in monitoring and scanning and finding bugs and all the other patterns we're seeking. Do you also use machine learning together? Layer of the stack to make the software self-esteem or not just the user experience? I think the teams do, and I have not asked them about... There's so much scope of machine learning everywhere. That's right. One of the key partners I work with and my team works with in the open source arena is our AI team. The AI team is based out of D.C., by the way. And Jan Neumann and his team work very closely with us. They also are open sourcing their models and they are do publishing research. They're working with UC Berkeley and other organizations, universities, on training their models and learning. And we are also competing for talent just like everybody else in the AI space. So I'll send you a URL with all of our AI information aggregated in one place. When you talk about machine learning and you also mentioned Open, how much are you using a lot of Spark machine learning or are you also developing your own and then open sourcing them? I think both. Like everybody else there, AI is ripe for collaboration and the whole workflow in AI also is being worked through constantly. How do you kind of develop these models? How do you train the models? How do you use them in your products, et cetera? So we do use... I couldn't name some of the projects for you. I'm sure we use TensorFlow. And we open source also. So we just... I actually yesterday or day before we just approved open sourcing model for our AI team and they were thrilled because you really learn these models need more data to learn and so by open sourcing we can collaborate with others. Comcast is doing so much open source. Why and how important is open source? Not only for the Comcast, but you have been in open source for so long. Since 1998. This is my 20th anniversary. Exactly. Just like the OSI. Congratulations. Thank you. I should make stickers. 20 years in open source. So I can put it here. So how important is open source today? I cannot think of a single industry that's not being changed. Exactly. And the words are so good where Andreessen said software is eating the world and open source is the way they're eating the world. It's the utensils for eating the world or whatever. Right. Because most of the innovation is happening in open source. Right. Most of the time to market can be achieved, especially for companies that have typically not been software companies. The only way to leapfrog and get time advantage is by starting with an existing set of components that are already well worked and well done. And the skill set is there. People are coming out of college or you can hire good people. Yes, there's a shortage, but developers look for that in companies they want to join. So if you are a company that's going through digital transformation, if you want to leapfrog, if you want to innovate and get competitive advantage or hire good people, you've got to use open source software. So it's a business imperative. It's a must do for innovation. So I'm always surprised when people ask me why can't you cast an open source? That's a why not. Exactly. Because we are really an innovator. We are doing a lot of work, whether it's in the cloud or the networks all the way to embedded devices and IoT and running the world's largest IP network and streaming content to millions of homes. That takes a lot of technical savviness and know-how. I mean, as you said today, if you're not a company, you have to be a technology or software company. Whether you're an A&B or you're dealing with hotels or cars, you have to be. Even if I'm a jewelry maker or making clothing, if I want to run a successful business, I need to know how to use it for my advantage. And the second layer now is that it has to be open source. So you have to be an open source company simply. Just cut the software part. And remember an interview with Sam Ranji when he was still at Cloud Foundry and he said that. And as he said, couple of years, we will not even be using the term open source anymore because software will kind of... It's just a component. It will become that software means open source. And we are slowly moving towards in that direction. If you look at today, it's actually not a question that who is doing open source? Who is not? Who is not doing it? And why not? Why not? It's just not... There are some cases very, very... But those cases will either they are unique cases or they'll fade out in time. They will eventually... I also learned that Kamakas is joining CNCF. You're already a member of Linux Foundation, right? So what is... Why CNCF? Yeah. I mean, they are babies, right? Yeah. But CNCF, the momentum is amazing, as you can imagine, right? All three cloud... Kubernetes is the biggest after Linux. After Linux. And we found that a number of our teams were using Kubernetes throughout the company. We are contributing to Kubernetes. We're using Prometheus and a bunch of other components in CNCF. And we were lucky to have Sarah Novotny and Chris Anaschek come to Comcast last year. We do an open source conference twice a year in the company. You don't ignite me? It's mostly an internal conference, but we particularly wanted to invite the CNCF team. And it's an area that everybody is using to hasten application deployment, right? Because we create a lot of apps in the company, whether it's mobile apps or apps that sit on your sit-top box or on your high-speed internet or in the home from a security perspective. And CNCF helps us do it faster, cheaper, better, more effectively manage our cloud apps, manage our container apps. So we feel very strongly about working closely with Kubernetes. What do you think CNCF enable you to make it cheaper? I think it's just managing our app deployment. Oh, okay, okay. You mean Kubernetes or CNCF? Kubernetes. Which is one of the crown jewels of the CNCF. I use it interchangeably because it's a portfolio of projects. Now it's become an umbrella where you're showing a lot of projects. The other thing that I like is that all of the cloud providers, the public cloud providers support CNCF. And they're providing services, Kubernetes as a service and other things, and we consume public cloud. And so it's nice to be a part of a project and influence or work with the cloud providers on extensions that we need or customizations we need in one place. I think we touch upon a lot of broad topics. Is there anything else that you think that I missed? Because one more thing I want to say is, you know that I've also worked a lot in diversity and inclusion. I don't know why to skip my mind, but I was about to ask. When you mentioned that you had three women controlling the whole world, that's the kind of world we should be living in actually. A much better, peaceful world. This is such a fabulous team and on this International Women's Day, I am so proud of my team. These are two fabulous individuals who single-handedly are helping us transform the culture. They are service-oriented. They take ownership. They take accountability for what they do. And you're only as good as your team. So I'm very grateful to work with Krista Kare and Sheila Saibi, who are part of my team. I also work, as you know, in the Linux Foundation and elsewhere on supporting opening doors to open source. And I continue to do that. And Comcast has been incredibly supportive of me continuing to do both of these work. And they sometimes go hand in hand. And I'm proud to continue to do that work. Chasing Grace is another project that I've been involved in. And I'm proud of that. With Jennifer Glor? With Jennifer Glor and Wicked Flix. And I sit on the board of another organization called Code Chicks, where we are helping women in engineering continue to stay in engineering through investing in their development, providing safe spaces for them to support each other and talk to each other. So I feel like my life is so rich and complete because I get to do what I love and I get paid to do what I love. Exactly. Somebody is paying for your hobby, right? Yes. That's why you don't feel like you're working here, right? Exactly. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think we learned a lot about Comcast today. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad for the opportunity to share what we're doing. And I'm happy to have that opportunity. Thank you.