 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE on the ground special presentation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE and we are here at VMware's corporate headquarters in beautiful Palo Alto, talking to all the thought leaders within VMware finding out what's going on. At the end of 2016, looking out over 2017, our next guest is Dirk Hondel. Can you say your last name, because it's so good I can't do it from the East Coast. Hondel. Chief, Chief open source officer, Vice President of VMware, newly hired. Welcome to our on the ground conversation. Thank you. Open source, obviously at my age, just turned 51 last week, actually celebrated at re-invent. You know, I was first generation open source and you know, as it got commercialized and it was still kind of like post-pirating software where we kind of steal code and you know, but it was established, but now open source has moved aggressively to being a tier one. Main driver of innovation, software is powering the world now. It really is fundamental as a business model and also for technology innovation. So how is your role at VMware going to continue that tradition? Well, so open source is more than a software development methodology. Open source is how a group of people interact and how you create innovation, you create fantastic technology. And much of this is a social phenomenon. It's how you interact with each other. And so as a company in open source, when you use open source, a big part is engaging with the community, contributing back, understanding how these communities work and be perceived as a friendly force in the market. And that is certainly a big part of what I'll be working on. Dirk, take a minute to explain your personal background because you bring a lot to the table here at VMware also and key things that you've been involved in open source. Well, I've been involved in open source longer than the word exists. I've been writing free software since the late 80s, early 90s. I started on Linux kernel in 1991. One of the very early developers have been involved in a bunch of other projects, X386 and many others, and have stayed a developer through the last 27, 28 years. I worked at SUSE, I was SUSE's CTO for a while, and I've spent almost the last 15 years at Intel as the chief Linux and open source technologist. So I helped bring up Intel's role where Intel is today in open source over the past 15 years. Well, congratulations for all the great work that you've done. Obviously where we are today with Linux has been a great example of great milestones. But this is where companies tend to either succeed or fail with open source. Certainly open source has enabled startups to get up and running quickly. The goodness of open source creates fast products to market. But as companies grow and participate in the community, what's changed? What's their algorithm? What's the formula? You mentioned it's a social phenomenon. How should companies keep using open source, keep fuel in the community, still be a good citizen and what's the playbook? Well, there isn't a simple formula. It's actually very complex to figure out how you can take something that is a healthy community, a healthy project and turn it into something that becomes a product. Because the biggest threat here is that you take too much of the engineering know-how out of the community and put it behind closed doors, focused on nothing but productization. Given the flip side, it's the productization that is so hard on open source and that so many people forget. Typical example, the Linux kernel, most successful open source project ever. Yet no one is running Linux's kernel. There is no sane company that would put Linux's kernel in production. Maybe if you're super brave, you're having a team that uses the stable kernel like what Greg puts out and productizes that. But most everyone realistically, who isn't a Google or someone of that size, will take a Red Hat or a Slash or something like this and use a productized version of this open source project. And so the trick here is to find a way to combine that productization, turning it into something you can run in production, yet still maintaining a healthy community that is interactive and that listens to the outsiders and stays alive. It's interesting you mentioned Red Hat. I mean Red Hat is now in a lot of big enterprises. It was not a tier one citizen back in the day, it was the alternative. And then had Great Beachhead and grew organically and then they have the great support around it and whatnot. But now it's a tier one citizen in software. How has that changed open source, if any, has it changed the dynamic at all? Now that open source is so front and centered? There are quite a few companies in open source that either went big themselves or got purchased by large industry players. And it has changed in that a lot more professionalism has come in. So if you compare 15 years ago, when we talked about Linux being 10 years old in 2001, the vast majority of people working on Linux were still amateurs. Today it's 85% to do this as a day job. And as you go through the big projects, you'll see the enterprise projects, whether it's OpenStack or Docker or whatnot. In this space, the majority of people who contribute code tend to do this as the day job. So it's a professionalization of open source. Yet, if you look at GitHub with 40 plus million open source projects, the number of projects that are driven as, oh, this is my day job, this is what I do for a living, is a tiny, tiny fraction of that huge universe. And if you look at how open source is used in various products today, the trademark big projects are just a small part of what really is run in production today. So a lot of things that are just driven by amateurs still end up being part of what you run for your day-to-day business. So I wanna get your thoughts on what you're doing at VMware, but first I'd love to get help, help us figure out kind of the feedback we've heard in the hallways at Amazon Web Services re-invent, which was a lot of scuttle-butt around, oh, well, they take a lot from open source, but they don't give back. I pressed Andy Jassy on this. He said, no, no, we have open source projects, and they had a couple of things out. They hired Agent Cockcroft who's gonna amplify that. So I don't personally see Amazon as a bad actor for the folks, we're closed. I'm not sensing any negative thing there, but some are saying that their product is so game-changing, industry-shaping, unlike a Facebook or Google where they can take it and contribute to an app like a search engine or a project or a product or an app like Facebook, they're changing the landscape of the industry, which could have a ripple effect to the industry. So help us understand that dynamic, the impact of what position Amazon's in and what they should do or how they should roll out, either amplify what they're doing or if you were Andy Jassy's assistant, what would you recommend? Well, I think all the big players in the industry at some point are being accused of taking too much and not being good citizens of the community. I think that comes just with the territory and has happened to us. Just being on top, basically. Yeah, you're being successful, you're creating people who like to talk smack about you. Fundamentally, what you wanna do in this space, you wanna make sure that the projects that you use that are integral to your business stay healthy, that you don't become the sole provider of engineering resources, that you aren't the only user and that you listen to people outside of your company, what's important, what needs to be changed, where are bugs that needs to be addressed, and that it continues to feel like something that is broader than just you, just the one user. The most dangerous thing that you can do is you start to hire the top players in a project, take them behind closed doors, have them only work on your product version and atrophy the community. That's the biggest risk you have to avoid. Yeah, that's a great point. I never thought about that. That's, you don't wanna essentially take the crown jewels in terms of the players, the stars, if you will, and keep that open. VMware, your role at VMware, what are you gonna be doing at VMware? And I know VMware's a lot of geeks in here, so open source is a big part of VMware, but it's kind of fragmented. At least I've never really looked at one cohesive view of VMware and now that I think about it, I'm like, I really can't put an identity on VMware in terms of what they are in open source because they got their hands in a lot of different areas. We are a big company. We have a lot of involvements in open source. We have big projects that we are driving ourselves and OpenVee switch was just handed off to the Linux Foundation. It's a very big project that is, the key maintainers are still VMware employees, but it has an open, a very healthy ecosystem and a community around it and it's very broadly used in the industry. So we're trying to do all these things that I just mentioned in a project like this. And we have a lot of smaller projects that we bring up in different areas. It's sometimes it's part of our core, part of what we do that we believe should be open source because it creates infrastructure for everyone, but often it's also tools on the side. So a couple of weeks ago, we open sourced a project named Clarity, which is a software design system that you can use to create JavaScript UIs based on Angular. And that is not core to our business, yet is a critical tool that we use to create our web UIs. And we made this open source, we're driving a community around this, very much in the hope that more and more of the industry players will use the same technology, the same tools, and we all make it better together. Yeah, I mean, my big, my big, the better together that's part of the marketing theme, we just had Robin Matlock on, good messaging there. The thing that we're seeing is that your marketing is your code, right? I mean, Google just launched their deep learning, all the source code. This is the new marketing, just putting stuff out there for free to let people kind of taste and look at. It's not. I don't mean marketing in the sense of trying to convince people, but it is a gesture of who you are if you push your code out there, right? Yes, it's part of your identity, it's part of who you are, it's part of how people interact with you. A lot of the people who are in charge of IT today, who are in charge of where this industry is going, they really build an opinion of a company based on what they can see in public. So our engagement in open source, the things that we are doing, the code, the projects, the way we treat the community, the way we engage in this space has a huge impact on how we are seen as a company. So in that sense, yes, it is marketing, but to me at the core, it's always about engineering, it's about creating great technologies, creating great software. Talk about the social dynamic. I find that to be one of the key things that tend to be overlooked by a lot of people that look at open source as part of now the new normal. There is a karma effect in open source. If you try to do a quid pro quo, that's not the extraction people look for. It's always kind of like these pleasant surprises that come from the social dynamic. It's the innovation, it's the interplay between the people in the communities. Talk about how companies should look for value. I mean, it shouldn't be like pay me now, it's more of, it is a karma effect. Can you share your thoughts on that? The way I look at this is all about people. It is done by people, it is humans who interact with each other and that's what's so often overlooked. A lot of people look at this as code and nothing more than bits and bytes, but fundamentally what makes open source so fascinating is how people trust each other, how there is this vast dynamic community of people from diverse background and from different regions of the world who all have a shared goal to create great software and they work with each other and they figure it out and there may be companies involved which have profit motives that are overarching, but fundamentally everyone involved wants to create better software. And as a company, if you forget that this is about people, that's when you will start to stumble. If you forget that on the other side, your users, your contributors, everyone who's involved are people who have their own goals and basically want to be valued for what they do, want to be trusted in these relationships, then you'll do a much better job in being successful and engaging with them. Who do you report to here at VMware? I report to Array of Herald, our CTO. So you're in the technicals, so it's not like you're in the business unit. You see, you have latitude, you have freedom to go kick the tires and all the different communities. Oh absolutely, I work all the way across all parts of VMware. You have a fun job, you get paid for this? I do, I do and I'm very happy to say that I have most likely the best job in the company. Okay, talk about the most exciting areas that you get excited about and that you're watching some of the, that could be tried and true communities too, upstarts that you see popping up on the radar. There are a couple of things that I'm excited about. One is to energize the open source savvy engineers that are already here and the reception that I've received has been incredible. The amount of email that I get, oh, we're happy you're here. Here's the thing I want to do is completely overwhelming. And then what is nice is I'm building up an open source technology center. So I'm bringing in some of the rock stars of the industry to help us grow faster in this area, build up more expertise and to be internal mentors to help. Bring them in as employees or just more advisors? As employees, absolutely, as employees. Employees, okay, you're hiring. So we are, yeah, we are hiring. And to me, this is exciting because whenever you create change like this, where you try to make changes to the way the company thinks of itself and operates, that's a very exciting part in the development. You mentioned the Angular thing earlier. What's the coolest project as you come in and open up the covers within VMware? What jumps out? What's a cool, sizzle, sizzly projects that you like that are hot right now that get you excited? Is it the UI stuff? Is it in the plumbing? Is it? It's all over the place, which is kind of fun. The interesting thing about a company like VMware is that it goes all the way from the deepest innards of how you interact with hardware, through the hypervisor, through the different tools, and a lot of our internal tooling that we use. So it's really hard for me to pick one because I'm likely to pick the last one. You're the only half the people I don't, it's like picking a favorite child, you know? Well, and then it's the other thing is that I know the next 10 we're gonna open source. I'm like, but if I, yeah, no, it's very hard to- How many open recs do you have right now? So I right now have a couple open recs for engineers and I will continue to hire over the coming year. I'm not a huge fan of trying to bring 20 people in at once so it's gonna be- So get the culture. Yes, every month we're gonna be open. Any events that you're looking at that are important on your radar for 2017 that are must attend for you? I tend to be at the open source summits that are run by the Linux Foundation. I am obviously gonna be at VMworld. The open source community is oddly not as events driven as many of the business communities. So much of what we do is distributed, happens on mailing lists, on Slack forums. A lot of this is digital. And a lot of this is highly distributed because the community is so distributed. Okay, final question 2017. What's your outlook in the open source world? What's gonna be different? What's gonna change? If anything, any themes you see emerging thoughts? Well, we're going to see get another super hyped new buzzword. I don't know yet what it's gonna be but it's going to be exciting. The cycling of the latest coolest thing in open source is as quick as it's always been in Silicon Valley. And we're going to see a continued focus on getting cool technologies that we've talked about for a few years closer and closer to being production ready. There is a lot of talk about containers and cloud and all this. But then when you talk to the end customers of how much of this do you run in production? Where do you think is your focus shifting for the next two years? A lot of this is about taking the things that are cool, were cool last year and make them production ready next year. Have you seen a shift in the mindset of open source participants? I mean, you know, the old expression goes standing on the shoulders of giants before you. At some point you're gonna be pretty tall at this point. I mean, open source is growing. Is there, has it been much more of a systems view? I mean, is it, we hear Amazon building blocks is a buzzword that they use, very componentized. Microservice, as you mentioned, containers is around the corner. Is the mindset shifting in terms of the engineer who's out in the trenches? Isn't open source turtles all the way down? No, I think open source is so pervasive in this industry that we no longer think about this. Oh, there's open source over here. It's just assumed. So there are huge swaths of this industry that are built in open source. But then when you turn around and say, I wanna run this in production, then very often you go back to proprietary infrastructure components. I mean, this is where our products fit in. When you want to take something that's really cool and exciting and is done in open source, but you have to have it run 24-7 reliably, you very often run it together jointly with open source components and proprietary components. And I think that's what we are going to continue to see. Derek, thanks for spending the time with us here at your new corporate headquarters of Palo Alto, VMware. And certainly we'll be at a lot of the Linux events this year. We're talking to the folks over there. theCUBE is very rich environment for getting great thought leaders and tech athletes, as we say on theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm John Furrier. We are here at VMware's corporate headquarters in Palo Alto for special on the ground coverage of VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.