 And yeah, thanks, folks. So this presentation may be a little too late for some of you. There were a lot of new foundations announced today. And what I really hope to do is just give you a little bit of the backstory behind the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Give you a framework to think about it. And then welcome the new foundation leadership to the broader family. And hopefully give you a few things to think about as you're kind of growing that foundation up. So the first question is, why would you want to start an open source software foundation? Like what's the heart of it, right? How many folks in this room have actively bootstrapped an open source software foundation? How many of you have done that and have been inactive for more than a year? Now you can look at those people and they have this 1,000-yard stare. And they have the kind of sort of twitchiness with them. There's a lot of work associated with this process. And it really is worth thinking about what are the mechanics of a foundation? What makes it really successful? There's some things that it's fantastic for. And there's some things that you have to really think about and some challenges you're going to have to work through. And we'll get into that in a second. So one of the things I always like to say is, all's fair in love and war and open source, right? One of the sort of principle reasons, one of the principle motivators of initiating an open source software foundation, taking this technology that you've lovingly and carefully grown and created a lot of stewardship around and sort of donated it out, is to make sure that this doesn't happen to your neighborhood, right? A lot of folks are looking at this idea of open source as a competitive battleground. Do unto them before they do unto us. And one of the lovely things about a software foundation is the act of letting go is something that gets you to a point where you're far less likely to encounter that hostile moment, right? We had a pretty significant moment today that a lot of people are talking about in terms of Amazon Elastic and who's right and who's wrong. At the end of the day, I don't think there is any right and wrong in open source. I think at the end of the day, it is by its nature a sort of an even playing field. And as long as you are pursuing an open agenda, the community will follow you. The right things will happen. It's not worth getting emotionally spun up around these things. But there are a set of things that you can do upfront to ensure that success happens. And as we're starting the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, one of the things that I think was a critical anchor point for us is we were very open and transparent around our agenda. It was easy for me as a member of Google. My agenda was really simple. Amazon had won. They had walked away with the game. I had to disrupt. That was it, right? We couldn't effectively compete at the layer of an infrastructure-to-service offering. We had to redefine the marketplace. And as a result of that, we were very open about our agenda. We just want this thing to succeed. And a lot of that could kind of baked into Cloud Native Computing Foundation from the get-go. So we were certainly motivated by the acceptance, the growth, and the community around this technology rather than a specific commercial outcome. Now, one of the things that you will soon discover. So we put together this open-source software foundation. And I think we had initially 28 members. And at the other end of the spectrum, like today, I think we've grown to something like 375 members. So it's just spectacular outcome for everyone. The early days of foundation forming are perhaps the most political things you'll ever encounter. I've done a lot of stupid things that people advised me against that ultimately worked out OK. This was certainly one of the most interesting and challenging. I remember sitting down with my boss, Brian Stevens, who's like an old hand in the open-source world. He was like, you want to do a foundation? Good luck, right? He's like, I mean, how that works out. He had this little smile on his face. And I was like, oh, I can't be that hard. How challenging can it be? And certainly, as you start trying to navigate the sort of early ideation process, it's one thing to get to a point where you have a small number of members. Another to get to a point where you have 28 large names actively providing support for a specific outcome. And one of the key things our council people to do is, again, transparency really matters. You have to wear your agenda on your sleeve. At the end of the day, if you come into this and think you're going to checkmate your opponents that are part of this foundation in 15 moves, you're just thinking about the problem the wrong way. The process of getting to a point where you have a jail foundation, you have a set of organizations that are putting in the same direction has to be grounded in some basis of trust. And I think one of the things that I've really liked about the Kubernetes community, and I've certainly liked about the CNCF foundation, is there has been an ethos of being pretty upfront with your agenda. Red Hat is a singularity in the open-source world. They've done an amazing job of commercializing open-source. It was always obvious to us what their agenda was. And they were very open with that. Google had a different agenda. Microsoft had a different agenda. As this foundation grew, everyone obviously had this perspective. But I think everyone was very open about that. So as you're starting to think about bootstrapping your foundation, there's something to think about. Now another truism in open-source, everyone talks about this. Open-source is free. Free like puppy or free like beer. Turns out it's free like puppy. Now an open-source software foundation, if you're looking at it as something that is just going to give you the sort of free, get out of jail free card to avoid negative outcomes on the back end, they're selling something. And it's going to be a lot more painful than just a puppy chewing a hole on your wall, right? There's a lot of work associated with this process. So it really behooves you to think through a lot of these mechanics. And one of the things that folks don't tend to realize, there's a lot of choices you can make in the early days of starting a software foundation. There is an inordinate amount of work. When you start looking at the mechanics of communications, when you start thinking about the mechanics of legal and all of the work associated with, how do we get our, what is our IP policy? What license do we accept and not accept? How do we deal with the mechanics of events? How do we manage and maintain a budget? How do we deal with all these things? It becomes prohibitively difficult. So for the folks that recently joined the Linux Foundation family, I mean, I think you made the right choice. If you're gonna do it, hire a pro. The outcome otherwise is gonna feel a lot like what happens when you decide, hey, how hard can roofing be? I'm just gonna replace the roof on my house, right? It's gonna, that's gonna lead you to some strange places and some very sad outcomes. So one of the things that I think, and I've certainly appreciated through the journey has been the sort of consistent support of a professional organization that knows how to do this, right? I'm not saying go and just start another Linux Foundation foundation. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is you'd be a fool to do this by yourself. Hire a pro if you wanna start something like this. Now stepping back a little bit, and this is not a Linux Foundation commercial, right? Like, I certainly appreciate the work that the Linux Foundation did. This is certainly not a CNCF Foundation commercial. What I do wanna do is point to some of the things that we did well, and then I'll talk a little bit about some of the things that are still opportunities for us to succeed. As we were bootstrapping the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and one of the things that I was certainly a student of was other foundations, like what works well, what doesn't, like what leads to bad outcomes, what leads to these situations where you get balkanization, you get a lot of negative forces. And one of the things that we worked hard to do when we were instantiating this foundation was establish this idea of checks and balances. So ironically, I'm a South African and I was going through my citizenship studies at the time, so I was learning how to, where does the president live? He was in the White House, like, you know, those kind of questions. But, you know, one of the things that certainly inspired me is we were at a point where we had one of two choices. When you start thinking about a foundation as a sort of governance framework, obviously the most efficient, you know, governance structure is, it's a bit evident dictatorship, right? It really is. We would not be able to find Alina's Torval. The Kubernetes community would never have accepted Alina's Torval. And so what we had to do was think through other mechanisms of doing this. And, you know, one of the most, you know, sort of durable governance structures that's existed to date has been the US Constitution, right? Checks and balances. You know, you have these three divisions that each are empowered to do a certain set of things and at the end of the day are watching each other and making sure that things are balanced out. And so we tried to take a lot of inspiration from, you know, this type of model as we were bootstrapping the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And, you know, that really resulted in these three distinct functions that we stood up. One was obviously the governance board. You know, this is the organization that has the bucks. You know, they get to decide where it gets spent. The second group that we stood up was the technical oversight committee. So the idea here was that there would be an organization that would ultimately be the taste makers, you know, for the company. You can think of them as the Supreme Court. They would look at a given piece of technology and decide, like, is this a good fit? Is this not a good fit? They would provide opinion and weigh in on a lot of decisions. And I think those two functions have, you know, succeeded. The third piece that we really wanted to institute in the foundation space was an end user community, right? And so this is something that is growing. We have, you know, good representation there. But, like, how many of you work for a company that's not a technology company? I mean, I guess every company is a technology company. How many of you work for companies that don't sell software? Right, so we still got some work to do. So as you start thinking about these things, it's fascinating, you know, how the dynamics go. You know, as you're bootstrapping a software foundation, you go through this intellectual exercise of trying to, like, you know, picture, like, you know, this is gonna happen and this is gonna happen and these are the state of outcomes. The reality is that, you know, I'm kind of a systems engineering geek. Like, at every point of a system scaling, you're gonna encounter new issues. There's no practical way to think through all of those things. And so, you know, again, this sort of loops back around to the need for an empowered, you know, constitution to underpin it. You know, you can't foresee every potential outcome. You can't think through every possible future. At the end of the day, whatever you write into that sort of constitution, the initiating documentation is going to have to be subject to restructuring growth, et cetera. And the heart of it is, you have to be willing to let go, right? This is the one thing I'd ask you to leave with as you're thinking about, should I take my technology to a software foundation? Should I be thinking about this? You know, there are some amazing value propositions associated with that. There are some amazing outcomes that you can generate if you get a well-structured foundation like the CNCF behind that technology. It becomes a point of singularity in the ecosystem. You know, all kinds of commercial success can emerge around that. And it becomes a counterbalance to a lot of the sort of vendor interest that can ultimately lead to vulcanization and some of the challenges. But you also have to accept that it's a leap of faith. Like, there's no stepping back from that. And so just, you know, think that through a little bit as you go. And the other thing is, and this is a sort of, you know, something that I really want to kind of challenge all of us to think about. When we think about the relationship between, you know, every open source community as represented here and the end consumer, it's largely driven through a vendor vector. Right? You know, every vendor is looking at a subset of the end user community. So someone might be looking at the three eggs on the left and someone else may be looking at the four eggs on the right. And they're gonna work within the community structure that you've created to serve the interests of those discrete entities. For us to really succeed and take this to the next level, to start generating even more value through these types of outcomes and these sort of, you know, singularity moments, we need to find ways to bring our customers close to these communities as well. I think it creates some very natural dynamics. You know, I've had a lot of conversations with customers. I've had a lot of conversations with, you know, like the CNC, FTOC, I've had a lot of conversations with the governing board. You know, bringing that together in a structured way, you know, creating an obvious open source, you know, platform for the customer's voice. Because if the sole point of access to the community is through the vendors, you're going to ultimately encounter a lot of these sort of, you know, common friction points. So I'd encourage everyone who's thinking about, you know, starting software foundation, like one, if you don't have to don't, I guess it's a lot of work, two, if you're gonna hire a pro, don't do it by yourself. And then three is, you know, really think through those structures that will enable not just the vendors to benefit from the technology, but finding ways to, you know, bring in the end consumers of the technology and make them a natural part of your foundation. Okay, well, thank you. Thank you, thank you. CNCF's success has been, truly has been, I give Dan a hard time about it, but, you know, 375 members today, massive economy around this ecosystem. The thing that I think you've brought to the table in terms of governance though, my interactions with the TOC, that taste maker role, at times there's some friction, I'm gonna just admit, but it seems to be working. Like, the people who are in those roles, even after there's been a changeover, are incredible, good taste, and I think are bringing a real cohesion from an architecture point of view to the project, so. Thank you. We're gonna call that the McClucky Twist, I guess, on the Constitution. I would like a second twist now. I want more customers in there. Fair enough. And thank you to this foundation. Like, this would not have happened without you, and I appreciate the constant, relentless support that you've brought. It's been an amazing outcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.