 Linux distribution is a collection of thousands and thousands of packages written by thousands and thousands of people. So who's freeloading from whom here? This is your host of the party and welcome to our newsroom. And today we have three esteemed guests, Wim Thokert, head of Oracle Linux, Alan Clark, member of the SUSE office of CTO and Greg Ray Goods, founder of many open source projects and CEO of CIQ. And today we are going to talk about open enterprise Linux association or open ELA that was created in August, which was kind of a response to some of the changes that Red Hat made with CentOS. I mean, we might again with the early days of Oracle actually interview with Oracle came up with, you know, unbreakable Linux early days. And then, you know, it was it's been a long journey when CentOS came out. So what I want to understand is just let's just quickly talk about how you folks have kind of seen the market change evolve, which will kind of bring these three players together to create open ELA. And then, you know, what we'll talk about the goal of it, but I want to understand what is happening in this space. Well, there's been a lot of things happening over the years, including just in general Linux adoption, right, the growth of Linux, growth of open source, and the benefits that you get from open source, right? And so as other things have changed in the market, that some perceived as threatening their choice and ability to continue using open source, we felt that was trying to collaborate together to address and being kind of more efficient in what we're developing in terms of price great things. I would add to this something along the lines of technically, we could have done this, you know, 12 years ago, whatever 15 years ago, and said, Hey, you know, we're kind of what you had sent us out there. We were doing out there. You had some other folks out there, scientific Linux and so forth. And so it was all kind of a similar thing. But we all did our own thing, right, sent to us that the sent to us distribution and the community part. And we did a more enterprise focused supported platform for, you know, customers that needed to support around this type of stuff. And then there were sort of, you know, ISVs packaging things up. And everyone for that long time has done similar things, but independently. And the advantage at the time was, well, we just go to, you know, let's simplify it. If you don't write a common download source of the AMS and do our thing. Well, that really stopped just recently. So we all have been continuing individually, but then came together and said, you know, now there's a little bit more work. No problem to do it. But why don't we just work together and save some time and money on our parts and put it together so that we replace that site with the open ELA site that says, here's all the source code and all these other folks that want to participate like they used to on their own. Hey, participate with us or just get the code, whichever works for you. There's no restrictions. There's no requirements. Like, here's the source code, take it or leave it. But continue what we have been doing. And we just kind of work together more now than before. And, you know, like I said, we could have technically done this earlier. There was just no driver for it. No reason not to, but also driver for it. Whereas it was a specific event that made us come together. They, you know, this makes a lot to do it also send you stability of working together across people and companies and allows us to their resources. I think that's what fundamentally happened. The only thing I would add is, when we decided to come together, we also realized it's bigger than just our three organizations. This is the community at large. And we wanted to make sure that we were operating as good members and stewards of that community, and inviting everybody to come and join and be part of this with us. And that's one of the things that I'm really excited about this is to even though we're founding this as these three organizations, but to see where this goes from here and to see how the community involvement influences the direction of what it means to be Enterprise Linux. Let's forget about what they are doing. Let's talk about who we are trying to cater to who we are serving, which is the customers know they are the one when they they build all those things. They are the one who suffered who struggles. So in the end, they are going to benefit. So let's talk about the primary goal of Open ELA. And then we'll talk about the scope of it. Primary goal of Open ELA is really just to ensure that we have stability of source code and collaboration around that source code to ensure that Enterprise Linux, both both distributors like us, as well as vendors and people that are relying on it in the community and users that everybody has a stable foundation that is predictable that they can collaborate with that they can contribute to in an open way and in a neutral way as well. And that was really the goal of what we set out to accomplish with Open ELA and the structure that we built with Open ELA. I totally agree with Greg on this one. Just to emphasize, this doesn't change the products that we as companies are delivering. For suicide, it means we continue to invest in suicide and enterprise. We also will continue to grow our investment in our Liberty Linux product line, which is what's related to this project. So there will be a Liberty coming forward. There's a Rocky Linux platform, there's Oracle Linux platform. This is about the source code is great state. Yeah, that's right. And it's an important message to others as well as it's this is not a new distribution. This is about the source code at some point recently became a lot less accessible to the world. We're fixing that and make sure that it is accessible and people have choice. And we just keep doing what we have been doing. It just means that for some stuff we have a new website to go to or a site to go to not website necessarily to download some of this code or upload code where we've we've been doing it or you know, CIQ folks or as Greg has been saying, members of the larger community. It's not just us. It's there for everyone to take and contribute and do whatever with it that they want to, right? And choice is important. And I think, you know, one aspect around open source, certainly for open source when it comes to community projects, right, where it's thousands of people contributing to stuff like a Linux distribution is not owned by any company anywhere in the world. As much as some companies are trying to make it as such, it's not, right? It's a collection of thousands of packages built by thousands and thousands of people. There is no ownership, right? And what the companies tend to do is provide support for that collection of software, because customers, certainly enterprises, they don't necessarily want to be on their own and maintain that and fix bugs on their own. They want to pay someone that they trust to do a good job at it. And so the competition for the most part that we all do is support quality and expertise in a certain area that customers prefer because of whatever their business is, whether it's high performance computing, the database or applications, you know, it doesn't really matter. A company says, hey, we want someone that can understand this area and provide support, right? What's underneath the more differentiation there is, the worst it is for the customers, because ISVs have to certify and test on 50 different things. And I used to say, and I think I mentioned this to you too, it's like building a distribution technically is easy, right? Now, whether it's a green installer or a blue installer or a red installer, who cares? Fundamentally, you're on a Linux kernel, you run GLEPSE, run OpenSSL and a bunch of other stuff, and that's what your app runs on. So the closer that works together, it makes it easy for ISVs to better, right? And so this differentiation stuff is not that exciting. It's really provide better support for those that need it. And for those that want to do their own thing, let them do their own thing. ISVs embedding it, but it's all the same. So it makes it an ecosystem rather than a divergent complex ecosystem with millions of test platforms that you don't want to do. And you've done a very important point that I was a touch upon, you know, when you look at the whole ecosystem or ISVs, when this, these things happen, folks, you know, of course, the whole blog sphere, Twitter, words or LinkedIn, people start talking about things. But the most important thing is that what impact these changes actually have on this ISVs, what kind of pain points they feel when things like these happen, because it disturbed them a lot. Anytime that there's drama in what people consider to be a stable platform that they can rely on, anytime that there's changes, drama, activity, you know, anything that causes, you know, people to be unsure about the future of what that, you know, what they've been doing, what they that does is this service to everybody. And we need to make sure that we get the point. This is all boring. Nothing's changing. And everybody can just rely on this. And they don't have to think about it. Then it gets the point where our three organizations, as well as other vendors, and other people in the community can start adding value on top of that in a very strong and resilient and reliable way for all of the downstream new resources and creating value to stability. And that's what Enterprise One is about. So Greg had two points I was going to bring out. One is, well, an additional point, one is if we hadn't done this, there was a fear from some of our customers and consumers of this technology, that everything would fragment, right? And by pulling this together, we're presenting all this fragmentation that could potentially happen. And then the flip side of that is, the biggest power of open source is collaboration. I mean, that collaboration is going to create this innovation that Greg is talking about. That gives our consumers the trust that this is going to continue for a long time ahead. Obviously, all true. I would come back to the ISVs. There's lots of smaller ISVs that used to be able to say, hey, my app works on all these platforms and this announcement. Now two months ago, made them concerned because it's like, okay, if I need to go and test five things instead of one thing, it's expensive and smaller ISVs can't afford that. Now that means less choice because if that ISV says, this is my number one platform, so I have to drop number two, three, four, and five, customers are impacted. ISVs revenue-wise, but customers choice-wise, right? And so what we're doing here is, hey, don't worry about it. It'll all stay the same. We continue what we've been doing. So you can still test on one platform. It remains all compatible. You keep your investment as it was and the customers keep having the same choice as it was before. So I think that message that we set forward in terms of compatibility is very important for them. As you folks said that there will always be, of course, Suza Linux is there, that will be there, of course, you know, Rocket Linux is there, CI, of course Oracle is there. So there's not going to be a new distribution. You folks will continue with your own destroyer. But can you talk about what does this collaboration actually mean, what kind of and what resources you folks are pulling together to help the community? So I think one of the key components of this is when we started the discussion, we recognize that it needed to be neutral. Right. So we're in the process of forming a foundation, right, and the governance that goes around it, so that those people entity is going to be talking for the failures that can happen with this. So that it's, it's available for all, right, and not governed by any single person or entity. And so as we published, initially published earlier a couple of weeks ago, right, but following the best practices for this, right, and trying to build a structure that we're still on that process. So I know people have a lot of questions that we haven't published yet. Because we're in the process of creating this, right, and following the best practices and build that which we're buying. But there's also overlapping work. For instance, a number of packages contain, this was just one specific example, but I think that makes it very clear, a number of packages have certain trademarks and copyrights that are not allowed to be redistributed. Every one of us goes to that same package and removes those trademarks and copyrights, makes it neutral, and then potentially for our individual distributions adds others, but we all do the same thing. Exactly. We all run the same test scripts to verify that we don't have any of that stuff. And so one of the things that we're doing now is say, okay, if we have five different scripts doing the same thing, well, let's pick one that, you know, is the easily, most easily maintainable or looks the best and we put that up on OpenEL so others can do the same thing and contribute our stuff together that way. So it's what we have been doing individually over so many years. If there are things that are overlapping, we just instead of doing that separately, we just kind of do it more collaboratively. So that's one example of advantage here. And like many open source projects, we're focusing on the source code, right? We're not making a binary distribution of enterprise open enterprise links. It's really it is just the source code, which now means because we're collaborating in the source code, because we're leveraging each other's background tooling, etc. It means we now all can go and focus on adding value for our customers and for the rest of the community. The way that's honestly, you know, more efficient, makes more sense and it's more collaborative. And you folks have been doing it for a while. So I also understand when you look at OpenEL, is it going to be like how challenging or is it going to be like bug to bug compatible with RL? Or, you know, what is the like when you look at, you know, that will be a big challenge to keep it that close. The goal is absolutely to keep it completely compatible. And we are going to be doing it in two separate methods. There's going to be a primary repository, which is going to be completely compatible, and then a contribution repository, a contrib repository, which will allow people to add additional value and additional capability on top of that base foundation. You know, one thing in terms of compatibility, because that does come up a lot and there are lots of questions about it. Let me go back to a comment I made earlier. Open source, as it comes as it's related to a Linux distribution, is a collection of packages that are maintained by thousands of people out there, not by a individual distribution vendor. So when new updates happen, it's all the same stuff that comes in. There's no secret private ownership of something that's IP, that's closed source. So I don't see how compatibility is, well, would be an issue. We just keep doing what we've been doing and maintaining that compatibility. I'm not worried about it. Now, if we just look at, you know, the whole let's say Red Hat ecosystem, of course, we can look at Rocket Linux, Rocket Linux is also there. If you look at customers who are leveraging, let's say some of the Red Hat technologies could be open shipped or whatever it is, but they want to use one of these clothes. What does it mean for them? Because this is but compatible or because their ecosystem is very tightly integrated as well. So can customers like leverage some of the Red Hat technologies while leveraging clone distribution? Absolutely. And that's part of the reason why it's so important for this level of compatibility. Very few organizations that I have spoken with will run one Linux distribution in isolation or completely. They're actually running, in most cases, they're running multiple different Linux distributions for different purposes, knowing that they can rely on similar tooling, similar expertise, similar packaging, and just know that that compatibility is going to be the big win for customers and for everybody using all of enterprise money. All this stuff worked before it will continue to work. Our customers are telling us that they have multiple different distribution because they serve specific focuses and solutions of what you discussed earlier. And they want to be able to continue to do that. So this is about choice. I do remember when Oracle came up with the Unbreakable Linux that it did make changes to the source code. And are there any concerns that after OpenELA, there might be some changes that Red Hat might make, which will make your job a little bit difficult or you're not concerned with those. Or you have already forced in them and are taking steps to mitigate those. We've never, in our case, as an example, as you know, in all these years, there's never been one divergence. There's never been one compatibility issue. It's not a problem. It won't be a problem going forward. And they tried some stuff before, like packaging up the kernel in a tar file. Like, OK, I'm not really sure what the intent was here, but it didn't really matter to us. So nice try. I think Wim said it perfectly. There are things, of course, that Red Hat can do. There's more stops they could take. There's more ways that they can disrupt the open source community. I hope they don't. I hope, in fact, I hope they go the other direction. I hope they look at what we're doing and they say, this is something special. To be clear, in my opinion, this is the most exciting thing that's happened in Linux in decades. I can't even explain how excited and how cool this is to actually come together on a standard for enterprise Linux and move that into the community and allow this to be collaborative and transparent in the way that we're doing it. Like, this needs to happen. And I'm super excited about it. So I'm hoping that there's no more drama. There's no more shots taken that everybody just sees this is a good thing. And we can all work together to make this absolutely successful, not only for ourselves, for the community, for our customers, for everybody. Yeah, I think it's saying, you know, be a good open source citizens. So let's hope that we'll all be good open source citizens there. How do you envision this association? How do you see, I mean, I'm kind of tempted to say that what Linux was to the kernel, it looked like open LA is to rel a collaboration around that. So talk about what vision you folks have for this association foundation. So as we said before, the intent is to include everybody that has an interest in this, have them come in and contribute and play their role. Again, we're talking about source, right? We're not coming by in areas, we're not creating another, yet another distribution of their collaborating on the source. And we want everybody to come and participate. That's the emphasis, right? Are we trying to do, we're trying to do some infrastructure in place so that everybody can come and play together in a fair, appropriate manner, according to open source best practices. And so we want many, many others, everybody else is interested in the model to come and participate. Yeah. And you know, one thing I would add to it is, you know, we were, we had to get something out quickly, because there was a lot of concern, a lot of confusion, a lot of different threads going out in different media areas. And, and so it was really important for us to, to quickly say, Hey, we're going to start working together. And that didn't allow us to basically spend months trying to negotiate whatever it is. Right. And so it's like, Hey, our goal is very simple. We want to put source code out there so that everyone can, can use the same thing if they want to and everyone can collaborate. We're the main, not main, I shouldn't say that we're some of the major folks that have been doing this for a while. So it was easy for us to get together and get this going and say, Hey, we already do a lot of this stuff. Let's just put it together and then everyone can participate as, as time goes by. I think that's another thing where, you know, there's only a few people right now. Well, time was of the essence. But that does not mean it's just about us. It's not, as Greg said, it's about community. It's not about us. It's about get the stuff out there. So we also felt that it was important to put out there what we knew as quickly as we could. Right. So what exactly is what I said? I said, we're going to have this for months and come up with the perfect money to put out there and come out and buy it started and teach trust. It's working progress. That's our purpose. It's for people to make it and help. There's one more thing that, you know, in open source, whenever you talk about these discussions, you know, one of the terms that people say, Hey, you folks are fleet owners. We are doing all the work. You're just taking our work and, you know, just creating. So, so what are your thoughts about that? First of all, I mean, as I said, I am also biased, you know, open source, you know, when I talked to Linus, you know, he said, actually, there are everybody who contributes to Linux is selfish, you know, nobody is doing any free job for anyone else. You know, so there in my opinion, there are no people but I want to hear your thoughts on that. Business is competitive. Right. And as we said, the products from this don't go away. But this is true to all open stores for the last 30 years. And amazingly, it works, open source works. We come together and collaborate, build efficiencies. The model works. As in the beginning, a Linux distribution is a collection of thousands and thousands of packages written by thousands and thousands of people. So who's freeloading from whom here? I actually, I jokingly kind of say it the other direction. We're all freeloaders. Everyone in open source is a freeloader. And that's a good thing. That's exactly what open source is about. It's about us all leveraging that source code, the free availability of that source code. And we can't limit and scope it to just what are areas that benefit one organization or one project. The amount of benefit that open source freeloaders bring to the world is massive. I can tell you from the high performance computing side, the amount of research and science that has benefited from freeloaders, freeloading open source software is massive, absolutely massive. And to say that those people are not contributing back to Red Hat's products, I'm sorry for the name drop there, but in that they're somehow bad. No, that's silly. No. We're all freeloaders. This is how it works. And it's a good thing that it works this way. What it's all about. We have started taking open source for granted the early days of open source where I mean, as a journalist, why you push, hey, why you should use open source, why you should do open source. Now everybody is using open source, but they have forgotten why they should do open source. So since we have like three leaders, they're William, Greg, of course, I want to hear when you look at today's word, let's talk about look word from the open source perspective. And when you see these kind of efforts, and then, of course, you folks are engaging in mitigating does it worry you? Does it concern you for the future? You see now these things keep happening. Open source will always be the winner. Does that question make sense? I remember Greg, when you and I talked last time, they were like, open source always fine. So we just borrowed a line from Jurassic Park, remember? So yeah, but I want to hear your insights on that. To go against open source is a losing battle. The open source community is massive. It is gigantic. And everybody in the open source community wants freedom. They want collaboration. They want to work together. And they want to make things better. Like, that's the right mindset. There's no commercial perspective that is going to come over the top and beat that. The community is too big. It is too good. And and I believe. Yeah, I would also say, in so much, you can make a little bit of a distinction, right? So when it comes to generic, useful open source projects, they're not typically built by one commercial entity. They're started by an individual, usually, or by a set of people that start working together as the starting point. Whereas what you've seen in some cases that you're referring to is a little bit of different, right? It's in some way IP that is exposed to benefit, you know, using the term to benefit the use of it, but still fundamentally controlled and exclusively developed by one entity, which is very different. And when you look at a Linux distribution, almost none of those packages, in fact, none that I can think of really, are from that world. They're all from the collaborative community world. That's not going to change, right? So I don't think there's much change going to happen in what a standard Linux distribution ships and what people at large use. It's just a few small, handful, popular projects that are built by a commercial entity exclusively. I think we're actually perfectly. The other thing I was going to add, what I wanted to cover was not to worry about it in this case, because the licenses that govern the sorts that we use like GPL and so forth, and the amount and number of people that contribute to those projects, right? There's just very little change that's trying to take over and change it. Alan, Greg, thank you so much for joining me today. And of course, talk about this part of it. And as well, I would love to see you folks again, hopefully in person as well. Thank you. Thank you. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. See you as always.