 So, as a long-time open source advocate, I have seen my share of myths around open source. And even many large companies, despite putting many efforts towards it, they haven't been able to crush the open source as if it's really a movement as much as it is just a better methodology of which to develop software. Developing software in the clear and open allows for better auditability, better understanding of the code that's running on there and saves us the trouble of, is there a backdoor in there? We can look at the code and then through reproducible builds, we can see if that code matches what is running on whatever machines we have it running on, be it a firewall, be it a laptop in front of me now. So why am I making this video? To dispel a couple myths, but I don't want those myths to be dispelled by me saying you're wrong because, well, I'm just some guy with a YouTube channel who's been working in open source for over 20 years and was crazy. Now it's becoming more mainstream, et cetera, et cetera, but I'm still this some dude, where's your proof? And I really care about where's your proof? That's an important thing. And what I'm specifically talking about is when you talk about PF Sense, FreeNAS, or I'll even bring up Security Union, those are really big open source projects that I've had people tell me every time, well, people, probably people who are reading this right now are doing these open source myths, and this is my video reply to them so I can show my work, show my proof, as the phrase goes, that, yes, it is used in mainstream. Now I can't name clients and name drop. The reason why when we do some of these larger consulting gigs, they don't want the information out there that they use whatever product. That is just a general agreement when I've done consulting at some of these very large companies that we are not going to talk about the products and the methods by which they were implemented because that is a security concern of theirs. And I say, okay, you know, makes sense, I guess. If you know there's a flaw in a product and you know said company is using that product and you don't know if they patched it or not, and you have them as a target because you're a bad guy and want to attack that particular company, that is a piece of information that's very important. So you know what stack they're using and that. But I also think of that as kind of in the reason I share what technologies I'm using because the other side of that coin is it's not hard to figure out what these companies are using by looking at who works there and figuring out their credentials on LinkedIn and go, oh, look, they're an expert in this, that's probably why they use it. And I'm actually, this is the other side of the proof that, yes, I've seen PF Sense used in large banks or even big Fortune 100 companies and same with FreeNAS and that. So here is an example of a way you can find out if they're using it. And I'm going to pull up Zip Recruiter and not sponsor this channel. I think it's just an easy way. They were the first one who came up for a job search for someone, a large company, looking for someone who's good at PF Sense. Now, if they're looking for someone who's good at PF Sense, they either A, have PF Sense implemented already or B, plan on implementing it. And it's a company you might have heard of, MasterCard. MasterCard specifically is looking for, and let's find it down here, someone who's familiar with Palo Alto Firewalls and PF Sense. So even though MasterCard may not list exactly what they're using in terms of hardware, I'm going to guess that they're using Palo Alto and PF Sense in their security stack. And this is kind of my point. You can reverse engineer some of this information. You can look up these companies and see if they're using some of these tools. And I'm going to pull up another company that's also using some open source tools in their stack. General Electric, maybe you've heard of them. They're pretty big. They've been around for a minute. And they're looking for someone who's familiar with Security Onion Snort, Bro, Seracada, Snorbi, or similar. Those are pretty much all open source tools that, once again, here's another company on the Fortune 100 list that is asking for someone who's familiar with that because they need to hire a security engineer. By the way, apply if you're that engineer. And they don't name names in here, but you kind of get an idea. I'm a big true NAS and free NAS supporter. We have reviewed some of their systems, both their corporate systems come with SLA agreements for people looking for that. And they're showing their partnerships. And like I said, we have worked and consulted with large companies that I cannot name as part of the agreement of working with them. But yes, this was implemented in Hollywood Studios and some news organizations, like very large media corporations, using this as their storage back end. Not some proprietary EMC system or name whatever company you want. They literally have stacks and stacks of free NAS into your NAS systems. We've done consulting with so many different industries from commercial insurance, medical companies. And this is what's in their back end. This is not disclosed anywhere in their publicly traded notes, but they purchased that. Now, there are, of course, if you're a shareholder on some of these companies, there are probably some receipts somewhere where they bought it from. And maybe you could reverse engineer it. But what I'm basically getting to here is, yes, absolutely open source and free NAS, true NAS, PF sense, and security and those to name a couple are completely not just toys I play with on my YouTube channel, but they're legit tools used in corporate environments. And there's just this myth that those things are not ready for prime time. Like it's cool, but we're still going to go with XYZ or, you know, we're going to go with Dell because, you know, Dell's the name we know and trust. But these companies, there are support contracts with them. And you look at a company like Red Hat. Who do you think they're selling to that made IBM purchase them for billions of dollars? That's because they're providing corporate support contracts. Now granted corporate environments versus downloading free NAS and loading it on a system you built, very different things. You still need really high quality hardware to run these. You need support. Well, you would like to have support because you either, A, have an internal team that's really good with these tools or B, you contract with Red Hat or PF sense or the NetGate found NetGate IX systems. You can pay one of those companies for support on their product. That's a lot of how the open source business models work. So this is as well as myths I want to dispel that these tools are not used in corporate environments. They absolutely are, they're deployed. It's just not as easy to get statistics on them. It's not as easy to get the information because they can't just disclose, hey, we sold this and there's not always announcements by IX systems. Hey, did you know we sold such and such studios, this many free NAS units or true NAS units with enterprise support? And open source also has the challenge of when you're not selling a license or something and things are freely downloaded and they don't phone home constantly to give you some usage stats like Microsoft has. Microsoft can tell you how many licenses they sold for server 2016 or server 2019, et cetera, et cetera, or any of their enterprise products. And then those products to stay activated constantly phone home so they know how many active installs are on different machines and environments. So because of that, Microsoft can give you numbers and it would give the appearance but you only have one statistic, you don't have the overall market and anytime I see any statistic I think about how they gather those because I'll admit I'm guilty myself and I see forms come through asking me in surveys, I hate filling them out and I'm going to go out of the limb here that there's probably corporate policies that prevent many corporate companies from filling these out and giving you really good stats. And those surveys conducted, we think about how those stats are gathered, like I said, when I worked in corporate even I hated doing them, they had phone surveys, I ignored those people and they will hound you to try to get information but sometimes you just like whatever, get off the phone and if there's a policy against us in those environments you still have even worse statistics and then take a step further how those stats are gathered. They don't have enough people to call every company so they call some percentage in different markets and then extrapolate the data to the size of the market. So if they start with a small error, they've now extrapolated and multiplied that error times however many filler companies to try to gain the market information. Statistics are very, very difficult in this context to gather and think about it yourself. Have you ever really filled out a survey? How often do you do this? And I don't know. So think about the statistics themselves but I just want to put to bed the myth that FreeNAS, TrueNAS, PF Sense and many of the other tools that I talk about on this channel are not used in corporate environments. They absolutely are. We have implemented them ourselves. It's just not something we can share. We can't wander around with cameras. I wouldn't have those jobs if I dragged a camera into some of the large, will say automotive and supply chain companies that I've been in. They don't play that there. That's not the way they do things. So while I can't show you that level of proof, like here's how much they paid me to consult and install something. I can tell you that I did it and the proof is look through things like ZipRecruiter or any hiring and when you see large companies like MasterCard hiring for a PF Sense person, you can probably get an idea. They're probably using PF Sense somewhere in the MasterCard network and a little bit of information for you. So hopefully this puts that myth to bed that this is absolutely ready for corporate environments. If it doesn't and you're just absolutely set on not believing, then so be it. You are and you can let all these other large companies know that open source isn't for them while they completely use it and Red Hat makes their billion dollars a year in support contracts for giving away software. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to LawrenceSystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. 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