 Hello, this is your host open party and today we have with us Marshall worth the founder and CEO of canonical the patent company of open Dua operating system We are here at the open stack summit Sydney and During this conference open stack foundation announced that they will be focusing on collaboration and open If you know open stack, they have been evolving because new use cases are coming up So they're changing and adopting as the market is changing and the market is embracing Open stack So mark since Canonical is a stakeholder of open stack. How do you see this evolution of open stack? well, I think open stack is maturing and that gets reflected in the questions that the foundation is starting to ask in terms of Their mission and focus There have been some very good Shifts over the last year I think the the the most important thing is that people are now comfortable with the idea that open stack should be focused on Infrastructure as a service the foundation is also interested in other, you know infrastructure questions But I see a lot less confusion now about what open stack is really good for The emergence of other communities like the Kubernetes community make it pretty clear that open stack is the place to talk about virtualized infrastructure on-demand and self-service infrastructure and other Communities are going to be the place where you go and talk about container orchestration operations or Edge Cloud or IOT I recall a few years ago. You said that the open stack community should stop BS as a service and should focus on the core features of open stack just compute networking and storage So do you think that they listen to you or you kind of you know You had an idea that this is the right way for the open stack community to evolve Well, I don't know that I can answer that question Who knows what the answer to that question is but but I think at the end of the day people are now Focused on the right things open stack needs to work It needs to work reliably it needs to work at scale and it needs to essentially provide that VM infrastructure as a service capability and You know, that's what we've always said. That's what we've always focused on There was a ton of other stuff going on in the open stack sort of under the open stack umbrella That I don't think made much sense and that's now mostly gone so what remains is useful and focused and I think grow increasingly mature So very exciting stuff that's going on Cells and the ability to really scale open stack. I think is very exciting On the on the opposite a on the opposite extreme like this conversation around edge computing I think is very exciting sort of as a Step between the the centralized clouds and the IOT single-node devices that are out there And then, you know continued maturity around the operations regime of open stack itself The upgrade processes and so on I think that's all good and important work When you look at the cloud today, there are so many different components. They're opening stack is there and then you have Communities that they use their shape is a lot of different things are being used And all these projects are being maintained by totally different foundations or totally different communities But you need all of that together to build your cloud So do you what kind of challenges there, you know, or do you think there is some problem that you know These are maintained by different communities, but they have to work together. It's normal From my perspective for there to be different communities that have different missions and different focuses, you know look at the diversity of open source today, right from CAD cam engineering all the way through to You know giant cloud infrastructures all the way out to Rosbury pies doing interesting things, right? Diversity and having different leadership and different communities. That isn't a bad thing That's a good thing, right? It Enables us to track the right kind of talent to the right kind of community collaboration framework for the right kind of problem so to me it's not It's not a problem that Kubernetes exists in a completely different community to open stack. That's normal We've had the Linux foundation for a long time. We've had the Apache software foundation for a long time I think you have to be good at working across communities and you have to be good at integrating stuff from different communities and none of none of that really is a reason to Change things I don't agree But what are the chances that you know the agenda or the goal of these communities these foundations may be different from you know a Different foundation, so it doesn't it create like a problem or challenges for you know vendor like canonical to kind of put everything together Oh, it's normal for us to to essentially integrate things from different communities, right? We've been doing that Forever Linux distributions have been doing that for forever It's normal for us for example to work with Hadoop on bare metal and Kubernetes on bare metal and on open stack and on a public cloud We work on with Linux on different devices None of this None of this is a problem look It's clear that the foundation wants to explore a you know brought across section of Infrastructure, and I think that's fine my interest is in open stack as a you know Self-service virtual machines virtual networks virtual disks on-demand capability for enterprises and telcos and I think it's great for that In fact, it's increasingly mature and it's increasingly Operable for for those purposes I think it's up to the foundation to explore other you know areas of infrastructure And if they find stuff that's that they can effectively provide a government governance home from then that's great But it isn't something that I have a particular opinion about or or a need for IOT has become a very interesting use case and canonical has its own mistake in IOT space You know you have a one-two course map there And then you look at you know open stack, you know and I to speak what are the new market kind of emerging in the same context Can you talk about that? Look the thing that I'm really excited about is is technologists and entrepreneurs doing really interesting things In the cloud we see a lot of that we see new businesses getting created around you know Digital transformation or mobile or even the web still right What's interesting about IOT at the other end of the spectrum is that it's Always grounded in sort of real things you know in the cloud It's kind of abstract people who are competing in the cloud They're kind of competing for the whole global market of an idea Whereas in the physical world you can't do that in the physical world There are lots of reasons why you could win the Australian market, but not the Japanese market, right? And so what I love about IOT is that it's it's technologists right software engineers and and and industrial engineers and entrepreneurs people with like business ideas, but They're doing sort of highly fragmented highly specialized super interesting real things So that's why I love IOT at the moment. I think it's very vibrant. You meet a lot of really interesting people I think there will be a lot of people who become millionaires right rather than a few people who become billionaires And I think that's cool right almost anybody who looks around them can spot an opportunity for IOT And if they know how to take a Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu and some software and make magic happen Then they can do very well for themselves, right? And so I I love that I think that that that makes for a very exciting environment Can you talk about some some use cases in in context of Ubuntu and Canonical in the IOT space that you've seen? So we're doing a bunch of different things in IOT First we're enabling Ubuntu on a very wide range of hardware From Samsung Arctic through the Intel IOT modules You know millions of different kinds of CPU effectively by putting Ubuntu on them We enable people to put and you know to separate the application development process from the hardware selection process, right? They can develop their apps on Ubuntu and then they can choose late which which piece of hardware they want That's the first thing we're doing. The second thing we're doing is a lot of work around The production environment The production environment for IOT is very challenging. You have millions of devices. They're very widely spread They're physical devices, which means that if something breaks you have to physically go there to fix it right they're not virtual devices and So we have to put a lot of thinking into how we make it so that you can deliver new software to those devices every day and Take very little risk in of breaking it effectively in doing that. So that's what we're doing with snaps. They're a very Efficient way to put software on a device very reliably and then update that software every day with very low risk Effectively if that software doesn't work you can go back to the previous version of the software So it's not so much that we're going to be experts in cameras or in Railways or in sound equipment or in drones or in robots or in cars What we are experts in is effectively what it feels like to operate millions of those things all around the world very Cheaply changing the software on them for security reasons or for business reasons every single day we have been hearing a lot about machine learning these days and From from canonicals perspective, especially in the IOT space a cloud machine learning is going to play a very big role You know not just to offer you know additional services to customers But also to make the stack itself is smarter to help a lot more monitoring and all those things So can you tell us you know from your perspective how mature is machine learning in this space and What role do you think it's going to play? I think machine learning is a new class of software, you know over the years We've we've we've seen new programming languages emerge that have consequences right they enable different kinds of Software to get built right now in a sense a Deep learning model right is kind of like a piece of software that software gets written in a different way It gets written through essentially studying data and and and analyzing data and distilling all of that data down into a neural model or an Inferencing engine, but you can just think of that as like a piece of software right it's an exciting new class of software But it's really just software What we see emerging as the pattern is that you know data moves to the cloud that data is analyzed in the cloud The machine learning happens in the cloud But what's really exciting is when the the results of that machine learning come out to the edge to your to your devices And then you get an experience at the edge That's sort of unlike any other software experience people have had before whether that is you know natural language processing on your camera or image recognition on on On your front door who knows right there's there's a huge amount of diversity and Entrepreneurial energy and what you might do with AI but the way I think about it It's just another class of software effectively a new kind of software But what's your expectation? How do you think machine learning is going to change the world around us? Well, my expectation is that more and more of the software that we use every day We'll have some machine learning or machine intelligence element to it Sometimes that will be you know The software that you've downloaded has inferencing engines built into it and sometimes it will be That the software that you're using is part of some sort of training mechanism to to to to drive behaviors elsewhere I Don't know what to say You know I mean like Ubuntu is an is an umbrella that wraps its arms around lots of kinds of software Machine learning and deep learning and AI those are just essentially a new class of software Let's let's change the topic quickly and just talk about what are the things that excites you more these days You started Ubuntu way back in 2004 and it's like you know 2018 now so so let's talk about that, you know market over who keeps coming out with new ideas and gets excited about new shows Well, I take I take pleasure from fairly simple things in life, right? I like gardening and I'm very lucky I am building a botanical garden that I hope will be around for you know much longer than I am and You know, I I really enjoy the fact that Free software is now at the center of so many interesting things, right? I don't find enterprise boring at all. I find it very very exciting, right? We're taking very complex things and making them better making them more efficient It's exciting to me that the ideas behind Ubuntu are moving so to the center of machine learning AI telco operations cloud operations and IOT, right? So It's not like I get to the end of the day and I'm really relieved, you know to be done with the day I love what I do every day and I love the people that I work with And my my other pursuits and hobbies and interests are fairly simple So where are you building this botanical garden? Oh At home, so I live on a farm and it's it's it's doing less and less farming and more and more gardening This question is very close to my heart because when I started my own journalism journey And it was my first job was in the open source and Linux magazine One of the challenge back in those days before like 2005 was that we had to write a stories that used to educate people About the benefits of open source that why they should use open source or contribute to it Nowadays almost everybody using it But the new set of challenges that kind of emerges that people don't understand how open source works How it's development water work how the how the community works how you should be kind of contributing back so that the product that you rely on are Sustainable so so do you also see the same challenges as that option of open source kind of There's an explosion kind of going on with adoption. I can I can relate to what you say, you know We are in 2017 and it's frustrating when you when you run into a person inside a large organization and they don't understand You know what the what both the rights and the obligations are associated with free software But I don't worry about it at the end of the day There are enough people who understand open source to kind of keep it moving in the right direction I wouldn't worry too much about the loose ends at the edges, you know The general direction as you say is that more and more institutions are open first Think about AI, you know, this is possibly the most exciting new field of research For the very large technology companies and they are all trying to push as much of what they know into open source as fast as possible So instead of holding on to things they're actually pushing it out into the open arena now Is it perfect every time? No, but I don't think that matters the arc of history here is absolutely in the right direction And you and lots of other people worked to essentially Steer things in that direction. So I feel I feel pretty good about the Long-term prospects for open source and free software Now let's talk about Ubuntu a product that kind of disrupted the Linux desktop space Ubuntu 18.4 is going to be released which is going to be the first health years after a very long time That will come with GNOME as the default desktop environment and Shell Personally, I think it's a good thing for the desktop community because Canonical cannot focus on the pure Ubuntu experience the base and GNOME community can you know build on, you know, they have a white community on all the things that you know The community needs so I think it's the best of the both world But from your perspective, what do you think about this transition this change? I'm very grateful to the GNOME community for the work that they've done to build You know, GNOME shell and so on and and I'm impressed with how the Ubuntu community have engaged and the GNOME community have gauged I think that The 18.04 desktop GNOME desktop is going to be clean and reliable You know, they continue to be a bunch of different desktop environments the KDE guys are doing great work Mate or mate has emerged as a great desktop I am going to be using the GNOME desktop, but I see a ton of other people in the office using all of the other ones So I think that's that's good, too I miss the work around unity I really enjoyed thinking about how different kinds of personal computing could come together and converge for me personally That was a very ambitious forward-looking project, and I'm sorry that we weren't able to see it through I'm glad that there are some community and some folks at Canonical who will essentially maintain unity And so, you know for folks who like that experience, I think that's great But at the end of the day my personal focus now is the the enterprise and the automated data center side of things and The and the edge the IOT and micro cloud kind of environments And so for me, that's a full day, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time You know reminiscing about projects that that I was unable to pull off Canonical has been a true disruptor in this space if you look at upstart or Me or even if these you know project did not succeed and did not become the default in the next word They disrupted the whole community. They disrupted the market and that's why we have you know system D today or Vale and committee woke up and you know it started working on it. So finally we may have you know modern display server for Linux Then you also started the phone project Even if the project did not succeed it gave the community a vision that you know They can have the fully open source phone into their pocket and now purism project to there and a lot of work is going on around that so you have kind of Showed people that you know there is a possibility they can do it So first of all, thanks for doing that. I appreciate you saying so it's always more satisfying to win Yeah, that's true, but you have won a lot of big battles. So it's really impressive. Sure. I've had my fair share No, though The question that I want to ask before we wrap up this interview is that there have been a lot of stories about canonical being public that Canonical is going to announce at IPU What exactly is going on? What is your long-term strategy with canonical? Can you talk a bit about that? Look if you look at our trajectory? more and more Companies are signing up with canonical for a portion of their enterprise infrastructure They have a relationship of VMware. They have a relationship with Microsoft They have a relationship with Red Hat, but increasingly they want a relationship with canonical as well So I'm pretty confident that over the next 10 years every major business in the world is going to have some portion of its infrastructure both cloud infrastructure or data center infrastructure and IOT edge Infrastructure is going to be honorable into and supported by canonical so I think that gives us great growth prospects and it puts us in a position of responsibility in terms of You know 21st century businesses So I'm quite comfortable that we can hold our own on the back of that as a as a public company We talked internally with the team, you know, we have different options and there was enough Desire amongst the leadership team for us to go down the course of being a public company that we've made that commitment That's the path that we want to be on We made some tough choices in April to put that in you know to put ourselves on that course I mean we had to stop doing some things that that we enjoyed doing We've had you know a good start to that journey the last six months have been good for the company we've Delivered for a lot of customers. It's a bit easier now because we've been more focused on on things that customers are talking to us about And you know, I'm pretty proud of what the team has done in those six months Over the course of the next year. We'll take the next step and then you know that the timeline will Unfold as it should There's always a last question now. You're back to being CEO of the company So has your role changed within the company? How is it different than what you were doing earlier? I? Do have a different job now. I do have a different set of responsibilities I'm I'm very grateful to Jane who carried those responsibilities while I shifted to focus on the product story That the team has really grown up I wouldn't say we've gotten old, but we've certainly grown up And so, you know, I'm in the fortunate position that there are good leads for a bunch of the different things commercially and technically that need to happen at canonical and You know, I'm enjoying I'm enjoying the new sort of responsibilities. I think we cover a lot of topic anything else you would like to talk about No, that's a good set. It's nice to see you. It's good that the Sun has come out in Sydney Oh, yeah, it's been really like crazy and it's nice to see you too, Mark Thank you so much for talking to us today. I really appreciate it and we'll look forward to the next version of one-two And all the big things that canonicals planning. Thank you so much and back to your audience. 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