 All right golly You guys are keeners nine o'clock in the morning And you got to understand who I am you know, so this has been a great conference lots of incredibly smart people explaining Incredibly useful things to you guys. I qualify as the light entertainment interlude So you can all go back to sleep now Because I don't have anything of value to say but I do have a few stories But before I tell my stories because you guys actually are smart and it's you know I'm talking to students all the time and the nice thing about talking to students is I can channel my mother so at the So I had obviously two parents my father was a Harvard business school Educated guy who studied economics at Cambridge University My mother never graduated high school her claim academic claim to fame was she got in her German language classes She got zero in German composition and she got one in German literature and when With the teacher asked her why she thought she got one in German literature it turns out because she spelled her name correctly Okay, so of my two parents I took after my mother So that's why I literally have nothing useful to tell you guys what did But my mother did have one astounding skill and I give her complete credit for all of my success and it is that she could tell a story as Well as anyone you have ever heard she could captivate a room Just because her stories were fascinating and they were fun and She was completely Unconstrained by the truth Okay, so when we were kids this is my two brothers and I would interrupt mom all the time saying mom That's not true. Finally my father had to intervene and say boys The people your mother are telling stories to want to hear the stories They don't want to hear you interrupt. You can't do that. We go but dad. She's not telling true so We find that we negotiated with my Harvard Business School educated father and We agreed that we could not interrupt my mother as long as her story was within Was within what does it work 10 times of whatever the truth was So if she said we had a hundred people over for dinner and we had 11 people for dinner We were not allowed to interrupt We only had nine people for dinner we could interrupt. Okay so I tell that story just to give you guys a sense of when you hear me say something and and Linus and Dirk and you know They hear me tell my stories and they'd start rolling their eyes because they know they're not true Well, there's there's a nugget of truth in there somewhere, so I'll let you guys figure out what's true and what isn't okay But the other thing get a member is everything I say is seen through the same prism So where you guys actually like to get things right and to a certain extent and this is what I loved about Linux and the early days of Red Hat is Is no one was really very nice to each other? But everyone was very respectful of the Intel microprocessor Because the Intel microprocessor was the objective referee and When you would contribute code if the Intel processor liked your code Linus would use it And if it didn't like your code Linus wouldn't use it and Linus didn't care Who you were he cared whether the Intel microprocessor liked your code or not? And that's what you liked about it It allowed this meritocracy to work in the very early days of Red Hat when I had no idea if this was going to make any money at all I Always had backup plans and my backup plan was I would go into technical recruiting Because I knew how smart all of you guys were and I knew where to find you and Better yet most of you wouldn't recognize a clean t-shirt if you saw one So you were all completely Unemployable in terms of going through job interviews But I'm a sales guy. I could have got you a job Okay, so What I'm doing these days is is Red Hat went extremely well So we hired a team of guys who were much much smarter than I was at building large companies So I was the CEO of Red Hat 93 through 2000 But in 2000 we had just partnered with Cygnus solutions We were suddenly a four hundred person operation doing I can't remember 60 million bucks worth of business and I had never worked for a company that big much less managed one But we were fortunate to have Matthew Zulek and a bunch of other really smart guys So I got out of their way and and the rest is history I keep running into Red Hat guys like like Steven here who who keep coming up to me I'm going Bob, you know, thank you for for setting up this great company And they've got it so backwards. I Just started a little business you guys at Red Hat have turned it into truly a great company and I'm just so Honored to be associated with you guys and proud of what the Red Hat team has accomplished And I'm not going to speak about the future of Red Hat the next fellow I met at Bank of New Zealand I made the mistake of what does he want to hear and he said what comes next? I Go whoa, that's way above my pay grade But what I do is I'm an entrepreneur what gets me out of bed in the morning is looking for new business Opportunities and I thought I'd tell a couple of the early Red Hat stories to give you guys a sense of Of just why what you guys are doing is important and why it's scalable and why you don't have to worry that it's going away anytime But equally why you need to find business guys to partner with if your particular innovation is Going to scale if you're going to do well with it So Yeah, I'll tell a couple of stories the first one Relates to 91 through 93. I was still in the computer leasing business I had sold my business to a big a bigger Canadian financial services company very sadly over those two years the parent company the company I sold to went backwards and Went out of business and I found myself. I thought I was a wealthy guy in 91 by 93 I had taken my net worth back to something below what it was when I graduated University 15 years earlier Only now I had three kids in a big mortgage But in 91 through 93 I was working in the computer leasing business I was doing a newsletter to try and and Make friends with you guys or your equivalent in New York and Boston and Washington And I would ask the the guys at the user groups What did they want to hear about my newsletter and they would say well tell us about open source? Well not back then they said tell us about free software You know the Kermit dial-up modem the X window system, you know this the Cygnus Tools and I was so that's what I would write about and I would find people to write about my little newsletter But yet when I would think about this space about where Linux was going I was a bigger skeptic in 91 through 93 Then Bill Gates has ever been a boat open source and links Because I'm a business guy. I'm an evil cold-hearted capitalist And I just don't I did not believe that altruism was going to keep a Sophisticated software engineering product going into the future. I didn't care How much the guys I ran into in this space in the Unix world loved free software and really believed in this collaborative of development But instead of it going away from 91 to 93 and in 93 I was now unemployed working out of my way sewing closet selling some slack wear in O'Reilly books on a thing called ACC bookstore We were in fact Amazon before Emma before the World Wide Web We sold books you you send an email to ACC dash corp.com sales at and you got an ASCII catalog sent back to you and Then you printed off the last page of the catalog and you faxed in your order and we were selling a drizzle and slack wear and What others those were the two big ones actually at the time But by 93 instead of this stuff going backwards It kept getting better as you guys know Linus actually came out with a 1.0 version of This thing and I'm going this doesn't make any sense. So I did a tour of Of the smart guy, so I went up and visited Richard Stallman in in Boston and I'll tell the story about the GPL in one second that Karen thinks is is a is an interesting one So I went up to Boston and Richard gave me the same story I was getting from most of these guys which was You know open source or free software is from engineers according to their skill to engineers according to their need I don't know how much Karl Marx you guys have written, but the Berlin Wall had just fallen and Just go there's no future to this. I'm at the end of this little tour. I'm down in Washington talking to Don Becker Who was doing ethernet drivers for Linux at the time? He takes me out to Goddard space flight laboratory shows me this really cool Supercomputer 16 Intel processors in mini towers stacked four across four up and literally wrapped together with duct tape All connected at the back of this thing with ethernet Cables one to the next and he would had just unplugged a five million dollar cray with this thing and You know, I was asking him whereas, you know, why was he giving away his software? You know the ethernet drivers that he was writing because it's clearly sophisticated stuff and he says Because it's the right thing to do Bob, you know, it's you know, this is this is good This is how engineers think this is just altruism I go no Don who pays your salary and And why did they pay your salary and buy you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of Intel boxes and Let you give away your software for free when they could have if they put a proprietary license around recouped at least some of that investment Don't stop and goes that's a really good question So he says you'll have to talk to my boss I go okay next time I'm down, you know I'd love an introduction. He says not dr. Thomas sterling Was He works stupid hours those with Don's boss. He might still be here. There's now 10 30 at night at Goddard So we meet dr. Thomas sterling in the empty cafeteria at Goddard 10 30 at night and I ask him this question So sterling says okay Bob, let me get this right Yeah, Don and his team are writing very sophisticated ethernet software And they're giving it away for free so pick a number 10,000 lines a very sophisticated code that these telling guys are writing and Yeah, it was a under a proprietary license. We might recoup some of it But when when we give it away all I get You know all I get is as a reward for giving it away Is a gigabyte worth of multi-user multi-tasking operating system with complete source code and a license to do whatever I want with it and you're taking advantage of me and What he had just articulated was a barter system Or someone it might have been Chris was arguing what's actually a gift economy system? I don't care But it was an economic model that actually works That by giving away something of value you get something of greater value and I go I bet I was willing to bet my kids college Education once I understood there was an economic model to this So I'm now committed to it and I'm now looking for a product that would scale that that when Linux got into comp USA That's right. You guys are all Kiwis. Okay comp USA was a retailer In the early 90s in the States computer retail one Anyways, the worry was once Linux got into comp USA. I didn't want comp USA to be my competitor so I needed to brand a Some sort of product that I could sell to comp USA instead of competing with them And that led directly to Mark and I getting together as a complete side note by the way Mark Ewing and I refer to each other as co-founders of red hat But the reality is and we both admit this the reality is we are in violent disagreement as to who actually founded red hat Because I founded the company that became red hat the legal entity if you trace it back was founded in my wife's sewing closet but mark started the project that was red hat Linux and So because we could never figure out who the founder was we refer to each other as co-founders all very much good nature But I'm interesting sort of historic element Okay, so the reason I was so excited or so interested and willing to bet my kids college Education on red hat Linux the thing that I was picking up from all of you guys or again your equivalents in North America wasn't the That free software was better than proprietary software when I would talk to the guys at Southwest Bell who came to our little Linux Expo in 1994 I think it was in Raleigh, North Carolina and I Would ask them why you're using Linux You know is it better is it faster is it cheaper and they would say no we don't actually like Linux It is neither better nor faster nor is it more secure You know, we really should be using Solaris or we should be using AI X But what it does do for us is when we build systems because we have complete source code and the license to modify it It gives us control over the systems We're building and no one else will do that for us and that's why we have to use Linux and as a typewriter sales guy You learn as a sales guy But one of the first lessons you learn is you don't sell features of your product You sell the benefits of your product to your customer And so I wasn't selling free software or source code work or price I was selling control over the technology and it was recognizing that the open source gave us a Feature that we can sell to customers that build all of our billion dollar competitors and the interesting thing for for red hat in the early days Is our competitors were not Suzer or caldera? They were our friends We were trying to create users of this Our competitors were all multi-billion dollar proprietary software companies. It was IBM. It was Sun. It was Apple it was Microsoft and All of them were multi-billion dollar players and and we're thinking we can make a living competing with those guys and The reason we believed we could was because we could do something for you guys and your equivalents around the world That no one else could do or was willing to do or their Economic model was aligned to be able to allow them to do which was to give our customers control over the technology and And yep, that's if I made a contribution to To the success of red hat. It was simply recognizing that and the single most rewarding thing I've done in the last month is before I came down here to talk to you guys I went into red hat for the first time in a long time Just to find out what their messaging was what it was they did not want me to say publicly Because I didn't want to come and talk to you guys have you guys record the damn thing and have the red hat stock price crash because The founder said something stupid along the lines of Lulu lemons CEO chairman and founder who who accused Their their customers of being the wrong size to where Lulu lemon yoga pants or something if you followed that story Okay, so so we're not going near yoga pants Okay, the single most rewarding thing about visiting red hat and asking them what I shouldn't say is They're saying exactly the same stuff that we were saying in 1994 The value proposition that red hat sells today is identical to that value proposition It is that they are treating their customers like partners in the use of the technology they're using I go, whoa, this is this just really Personally at the both in a business sense, but personally it just really it makes you happy To realize that business actually can work really well. I mean I've always known it could work well I've been a businessman Since well, I come from a long line of business guys And so we know that business can be a very beneficial in fact primarily is free markets And the capitalist system really does work well to make our society richer and wealthier But every now and again you see a project like the red hat project and you just go wow You know and we fixed a problem that the US Justice Department was struggling with Again in the early 90s when they were watching the big monopolies that that Microsoft were accumulating and This open-source community solved that problem for the Justice Department Such that all of the predictions in the early 90s about how the US Justice Department was going to break up Microsoft into its component parts went away and it went away because of what this community on a global basis did from 91 through 96 or 7 when the Justice Department just completely dropped to the investigation against Microsoft it just hugely What Satisfying in a personal sense Okay Here's the interesting story that Karen was talking about and then I'm going to go to questions because I'm more interested in what you guys want to know than expounding but Karen was at a Sandler of the Software freedom Conservancy if you haven't bookmarked the software freedom conservancy now is your chance. Okay She was at a little talk I was giving in Raleigh and someone asked the question of What do you think about the different free software licenses and? I came out with this rent in favor of the GPL over everything else and Karen goes hold on. I love the GPL. But why does this evil capitalist love the GPL? And here's the story is when we were In the early days of red hat and we were looking at all the different licenses and there was a lot of debate Okay, we're we're the BSD licenses out in California more intelligent because they allowed you to use the the software without The author of the software surrendering as much control as says he might with the GPL or Or the NPL the Netscape public license that the you know tried to fix what the Netscape lawyers considered some of the flaws in the GPL or And you guys can Google Free software licenses and you'll see just how fast the debate was in the range was Well, I'm a I'm not a lawyer I'm a business guy and Business guy the biggest single challenge you have as a business guy is to get the world to pay attention to you That's your biggest single challenge. So you've got to simplify your pitch and you've got to find things that resonate and Talking licenses, they're they talking about licenses in front of customers was the quickest way to get someone to go running back to Microsoft Because they didn't want to have to think About clause 13 in the NPL license They didn't want to have to understand why the net why the BSD license was better or worse than the GPL and The beauty of the GPL license and and the guys at the free software foundation deserve a lot of credit for the first 10 or 12 years of this is they had to find the term free software around the GPL So you didn't even have to read the GPL the moment you said your software was Under the GPL everyone knew precisely what that meant or at least they believe they did doesn't matter. It's the same thing for practical purposes. I Told you I'm not a lawyer. Okay I'm a sales guy and sales guys. Don't worry about the details This is where my mother's training about as long as what I tell you is within Has a 10% of it of a nugget of truth in it Gives me complete permission to con you in to using red hat rather than Susan But quite seriously I do to this very day. I do not care whether you use red hat or Susan or or Call me I've been out of the Linux world so long I can't even Come up with the names that it's really not slack. We're an Idrisle anymore Because the guys at Suzer doing the right thing if you are a Suzer loser user That actually was a Freudian slip I wish I was that clever By the way, can I take this home? Thank you So the value of the GPL coming back to this is that it communicated what we were about And and we are under pressure our lawyers never understood where our commitment was the industry even the open-source industry Never understood our commitment and certainly Richard never understood my commitment to the GPL Richard Stolman when I would meet him at conferences He understood we were doing the right things, but he was convinced we had an agenda You know once our market share was big enough We were gonna slap a proprietary Microsoft's license on something And what he didn't understand was I'm a typewriter sales guy and The value that open-source gives my customers was control over the technology. They're using and That was the only benefit that I could offer that IBM and Apple and Microsoft were not prepared to do for my customers and that's where our commitment to the GPL comes from and If you're thinking about doing open-source projects Just don't waste your time trying to Micromanage your license and build a better one Because in the effort to build a better one you lose the primary value your customers now have to read your license to understand How your license works vis-a-vis their project and the very act of having to read your license will stop them from doing business with you The moment you just can use an existing license and and our preferences the GPL everyone knows Precisely what they can do with it. They relax then they keep moving forward and they're happy to do business with you because you Simplify their lives and that's a key element to all customer Relationships if you can make that customers life simpler, he likes you a lot better than if you would make his life more complicated Okay, so what do you guys want to know? Instead of what I want to know sure go ahead Or just speak up and I'll repeat your question Right, so you mentioned being an evil capitalist and I just wanted to know when you sort of Wait when you were managing red hat when you sort of took a step back and go wow we really are changing the world okay, so as a You know how families go in in Trent So, you know doctors tend to come from families who have had other doctors and lawyers tend to You know in a much higher percentage than the general population come from families that have other lawyers You know my father and my grandfather were Entrepreneurial businessmen, so I think in terms of making the world a better place through building companies Because in our free market democracies the consumer and the citizen are the same person And you can frequently solve social problems In the marketplace allowing the our society to vote with their pocketbook on The product or the service that they consider Most aligned with what they need to make their world a better place Okay, having said that Particularly businesses once they earn a monopoly position can abuse their market power and that's and so as a result I'm a big fan of government regulation Done properly Which is a big issue, but I think of regulation is simply being like the referee on a football field Without a referee you literally can't play football And I don't care what kind of football you're talking about without a referee You can't play because the guy who cheats the most will win and Then the whole thing collapses because everyone cheats and there are no rules So you have to have referees in the space because the capitalist guys like me We we are innovators We're looking for ways to change the market to the benefit of our shareholders at the expense of someone else's shareholders Not the Suza guys because I love their shareholders So so it's sort of a joke I make but it's a joke that it's acknowledging a reality That there are businesses that do really well making the world a worse place You know pick your favorite to You know the naked people Businesses alcohol or tobacco businesses as a good example They are serving a desire of our society, but they're not serving a need and they're definitely not making the world a better place But they are making a lot of money doing it Sorry next question It seems to me that it's certainly something that we or in this room agree that control over the software and being able to use it and learn from it and verify it and continue it is And I'll a great benefit not only to us, but to the people that we You know that we deploy this software for and so forth, but it sometimes seems to me the customers of large Linux companies and You know even people using Android phones say Aren't interested in the control that that might give them they're interested in the fact that someone else has looked at it Or that it's free or that sort of thing. Do you how do you think we can communicate better? And what do you think what do you see this sort of the features of control that are actually going to mean something to those people in the future? It's golly. No, it's a great topic And I would encourage each and every one of you to reach out to each and every Open source aficionado, you know around the planet to make sure that you guys understand You have a role to play in the healthy functioning of our society Because our politicians Who aren't necessarily bad guys I've met many of them They're they're trying to do the right thing the problem is very very few of them if any No, that's not true very few of them I've met a whole bunch of politicians who actually have technical backgrounds But we're still talking 5% of the political class on around the world And so most politicians just don't understand the difference between software and source code and binaries So when they buy voting machines in the United States and they buy voting machines that are closed You know, it's binary only software and you don't get a license to look at the software And now you're trusting the health of your democracy to a machine That is close or software. You don't actually know what that machine does It's just bad for our democracy to not have transparency in the technology We are using and our politicians don't yet understand this I'm optimistic that our politicians will understand it the kind of work that Larry Lessing did both at the creative commons And now he's doing on the I kept painting to try and get money out of our political system What Larry really cares about is transparency and that's what Larry does and articulates as well as anyone The guys that another non-profit in the US that that we helped get started public knowledge Are very much on the same theme the EFF does has Does and has done brilliant work in this space and You guys each and every one of you as citizens of wherever you are citizens But particularly as citizens of the world you have a voice and I know it feels like you're a lone voice in the wilderness But seriously collectively you are incredibly powerful And I need you guys all to step up and make sure that whenever you happen to bump into a politician in In the street you make sure that he's aware of what you care about because Because you can be as cynical as you like about our political systems, you know, and then you reassure yourselves with Winston Churchill's great line about democracy is a really terrible way to govern ourselves until we you consider all the others Okay It may be a messy system, but having talked to a lot of politicians The one thing that does reassure you is they're all motivated more by votes than by money So Larry has a valid point money does corrupt our political system But these guys actually care about votes even more than money because they know That the money flows from the votes not the other way around Anyway, so for what it's worth keep keep Doing your bit and collectively we will make a difference. Sorry. There was a question. Thanks. Thanks, Bob I my name is Donna. I helped publish a book called free software for schools using Lulu I'd love to hear a bit a store a Lulu story. Oh Donna, thank you so much Because I am a tech writer salesman and I need an opportunity to make a The real story I'm going to tell you though here is is you know, Chris is worried about me running over my time But you guys are actually stuck here for the next two days Because on the compensation method that we use here Chris doesn't pay me a nickel to fly all the way to New Zealand to Talk to you guys. So the only way I get to recover the cost of my time is through impressions So so the longer I stand here the more impressions per person I achieve Okay, I'm not going to give you much of a pitch on Lulu other than saying It's a fun project We have built this publishing platform that allows you when you send your book into a publisher and you get a rejection slip Which the publishing industry will tell you they reject 19 out of 20 books that come their way And they'll tell you that they're doing the world a favor when they do that because they're getting rid of the 19 bad Books in favor of the one good book, but the publishing industry's flaw is that They actually get rid of books for three reasons one is because the book isn't any good And I'm sympathetic to their point because a lot of those people then come to Lulu And I read a lot of Lulu books and some of them are really bad Okay, but the other two reasons the publishing industry rejects a book are economic reasons They don't believe the market for the book is big enough So it doesn't matter how valuable the book is that you've written or the content is that you want to publish To some small marketplace if that marketplace is not big enough the publishing industry will not return your phone call And the other one is if they already have one of those books so in the United States There are six economics one-on-one textbooks and the reason for that is There are six textbook publishers in the United States They have zero incentive to publish a seventh economics one-on-one textbook no matter how much better That textbook might be than one of the existing six and So by building a publishing platform Lulu has enabled that big huge number Millions of people around the world to publish their content to their audience without having to go through the publishing industry I won't get into the longest story as a business and it's an interesting business one but I you know you can corner me afterwards about how Red Hat competing with Microsoft could do something that Microsoft simply wasn't able to do because of their business model That delivered a benefit to our customers that made those customers sufficiently loyal to Red Hat that Red Hat is now What is it seven thousand people on their way to two billion dollars worth of revenue? And meanwhile Lulu Amazon decided that they really liked what we were doing So now Amazon are doing very similar things. Of course, they don't do it nearly as well as we do it So you think I was picking on the guys at Sousa you should get me alone and have me talk about Bezos and Amazon But So they don't do it nearly as well as we do but being the world's biggest bookstore The typical author says well, I can use Amazon I end up being published on Amazon and that's all I care of it And so Amazon is a serious competitor of ours in a way that Microsoft was never Serious competitor of the open-source movement because they couldn't offer our customers the benefit that we could offer But follow-up after Well, you said you're our business man and don't care too much about details You praised the GPL, but there is a little deep detail like GPL version 3 Which I understand the business world doesn't really adopt and you tell us something about that So I've had a lot of these debates with really smart people in this space and And your point that thank you for acknowledging the problem, which is that I'm a tech writer salesman and I channel my mother And so when it comes to the details, I sort of you're gonna have to corner ebb in it or Karen for that matter either of them could argue it could explain The specifics of how things fit into the various categories better than I can do it But I think if I understand correctly that there's a story that that would be helpful And it's why I am so lost in admiration of what Richard Stolman The genius of his idea that goes back to 1984 Where he tried to do a free free software that he wrote software and he tried to give it away And he wanted to work collaboratively with other engineers on this this project. He tried to give away and the problem is that The and you'll have to ask Richard the specifics of the story But what he recognizes anyone could take his software Make modest changes to it and copyright the whole thing such that he would have to pay them Royalties to use his own software because legally there was no such thing as the public domain No judge would have ever punished anyone for doing precisely that because there was no legal structure the judge could not find someone guilty of Taking software that Richard was trying to give away for free and doing something with it, okay? And what Richard's great innovation was was to say look We don't have to go to Washington and get them to come up with laws around the public domain We'll use precisely the same laws Only we'll use them in the reverse fashion and we will copyright Our code in such a way that it has to stay in the public domain And that's what the genius of the GPL was and you can like or not like various terms and and Considerations of the GPL and I'm not suggesting The GPL is the only appropriate license I'm just a big fan of it because it's the single most effective license, but there are other licenses that are conceivably more useful in other spaces than than for redhead And our commitment to the GPL, but that's really Richard's genius and that's that 1984 insight into copy left using the existing copyright Legislation to create a public domain is what allows all of us to do what we are doing without stoneman in that insight We'd all still be writing proprietary software licenses on all of our code Sorry, there was a question over here how does the philosophy or your admiration for GPL and Free software translate to Lulu where you are actually publishing a use Do you encourage your authors to publish things on the GPL? Do you use free software within Lulu to in part as part of your business? Okay, so Yeah, as I say, I'm not an ideologue It's one of the areas that that Linus and I haven't spent a huge amount of time together but yeah, you know, we've trade enough debates and I followed his his arguments on the internet and We share this one philosophy Which is that we really believe in free markets and we we believe in the free exchange of ideas and we don't like imposing a Set of rules on people just because they're the correct rules We should have the debate we should try it we should you know Experiment and figure out what the correct rules by what works. Okay? So my interest in the GPL what I loved about the red hat thing and what we're trying to do with Lulu isn't About source code or about given licenses. It is about empowering customers empowering users to do things they could not otherwise do That that's as a businessman That's always what you're trying to do if you're a successful business It's because you do something for your customers that no one else does as well as you do it If you're a modestly successful businessmen it's because you're doing things for your customers as well as other people do it and now Customers have an even choice. They can have coffee at Starbucks or they can have coffee at caribou coffee and There's yeah other than marketing. There is no real magic to what the guys at Starbucks are doing So, you know, that's how I think about this and this Lulu idea of What we're really building is is a democratic platform so anyone can publish their books is In the same theme as what we did at Red Hat. It's a very different Market it's it's so you know proof will be in the pudding if if If Lulu goes public and is worth How much is Red Hat worth these days anyways? Several billion dollars then we will have done a good job for our customers with Lulu if Lulu Remains a mid-sized company will have done an okay job for Lulu and if Lulu goes away Clearly someone else did a better job than we did Other questions. Yes. Hello. I hope and how much time do we have Chris? Steven how much time? But five minutes, okay you mentioned Thomas Sterling and He these days he leads the something called the center of research from extreme-scale technologies towards Excess-scale computing Which leads me to certain analogies that I want to ask the entrepreneur the business person if we are in Situation as we were in the 90s. Is there this new architecture this new hardware? with all Requires a new Software paradigm that we can take advantage. Is this a business opportunity out there or is just for? Department of Defense taking advantage or major approaches government funded taking advantage of the excess scale computing which is coming Okay, and sorry say that one more time for me Where are you from by the way? From different places. I'm from one room in the South Island of New Zealand, but your accent is from where? It's a mix of Uruguay, Hungary, and New Zealand. There's no wonder I'm surprised that you don't recognize it So I was by the way, I was at a wedding a cousin's son got married and Adelaide on the weekend You know very nice in fact a wonderful wedding and great speakers and I went up to the speakers afterwards to congratulate them on Giving lovely talks at the wedding and the only my only complaint was they spoke in Australian. I Didn't get a single one of the jokes I Anyway, sorry, so it's Exascale computing a lot of Floating points or whatever. Okay, what I heard in your story and feel free to answer following your mother's inspiration Yeah, I just want to say I have a Tom Sterling speaking the conference in one month really about When you see him you have to go up and thank him for I will do that for you I have not seen Dr. Sterling and well you come back to Wellington in one month And where is the conference? It's in Wellington. Sorry for that. Oh, okay. Well into 17 18 February. Okay, so the point is He's working on the extreme scale research center or something like that University of Indiana. Yeah towards extra scale computing Which is an area that I am exposed due to a big project called the square kilometer array What I'm asking to the entrepreneur who every morning wakes up looking for a new business opportunity is that is this just in the realm of government-funded projects or esoteric thinking or actually we have Business paradigm yesterday even Mowgli say that the new hardware architectures are opening a new world that we don't know yet Okay, so I'm not going to answer the specific question because I just don't know enough about it But talking about this wedding as in Adelaide my aunt Joan, so my cousin His mother is is at Joan net Joan is 93 and in very good health But her memory is suffering so she's in a home in in Adelaide And so I went to visit her and she was she has been a watercolor artist all her life And she was she had a stack of watercolor the paintings that she had done and I mentioned to Janie my other cousin You know say hey Janie so does it Joan selves? Janie bursts out laughing saying Bob you are so damn consistent So here I'm visiting my my aunt Joan and who's I shut in in Adelaide and my thought goes to helping it Joan build a business Rounder hobby Okay, so the answer is here's how to tell Is if there's enough people like you going to this conference because you need The tools that Sterling and others are working on building Then yes, there's a real business opportunity But then you have to investigate Is that a business opportunity that is better served to buy IBM or or He'll it Packard or red hat then served by some entrepreneur and the typical difference there is Is it aligned with what one of those big companies already do simply an extension of what they're doing? Or does it somehow run counter to what they do and is in other words, they would have difficulty doing it and if if the second Then it's an entrepreneurial business opportunity if the first then you call up your buddies at red hat and say Hey, you should come and do this because I as a customer need this service I can't trust some government agency to support my use of this technology I want you guys to support the use But if you say if these guys all say oh no that runs counter or to our business model Not a chance or we ever going to do that for you Then you get to either start the business yourself or or go and find someone who is willing to at least attempt to build a business to support your use of that technology or of that solution It's for what it's worth. Are we done? I think we're all done. Thank you all for joining us. I want you to thank Bob