 From Seattle, Washington extracting the signal from the noise It's the Cube on the ground at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015 Now here's your host Jeff Frick. Hi Jeff Frick here with the Cube We are on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the OpenStack Seattle Innovation Day It's kind of a super-sized meetup if you will I think it's the first kind of dedicated event to OpenStack here in Seattle We're in Vancouver for OpenStack Summit, which is the big annual conference will be at OpenStack Silicon Valley next week So it's kind of all about OpenStack right now and then there's a lot going on in Seattle with Linux con and container con and everything else So we're really excited up with our next guest Alan Clark director of industry initiatives emerging standards and open source For SUSE, but you also wear a bunch of other open source hats As the chairman of the OpenStack Foundation and then you said another one we didn't have on our notes Yeah, so I'm chairman of the board for the OpenStack Foundation I'm also on the board of directors for the Linux Foundation been doing that since the beginning of the foundation actually So you're just like Mr. Open Source. I think could be your new moniker or maybe it already is yeah So, you know people go wow, what do you and I just say I'm having fun. I just do it because I have fun That's great So I think really what's unique about your position and what I want to dig down is perspective, right? Because obviously Linux is kind of the granddaddy of the mall in terms of enterprise open source really changed the game and on the Operating system side. It's been around forever. I think she's been around for 20 years or plus But you know open source projects have have a potential to kind of go off the rails a little bit You got to manage into the community as well as management of the technology and now we're seeing this huge wellspring of Open projects constantly What what what are some of the lessons learned in the management of the Linux process? And then more recently now OpenStack and as we look at Docker and and all these other things that you think are Really critical to the success of these projects. So so the thing that's been very interesting and notice from Linux Con this week announcement of a lot of new open source efforts and I think that the great thing that's happened is Not only are we seeing a lot more participation particularly corporate participation in open source, right? It's it used to be a debate of open source versus not and now We can just see a broad adoption through corporate industry But the other beauty is is these new organizations are learning from the existing organizations So the whole point of open source is sharing and collaborating and they're learning, right? We're sharing and we're learning from each other about Governance models Collaboration models and so forth. So the thing that I find exciting with these new Open-source projects that are just starting up is they're learning from us. So we so using OpenStack we learn from from the Linux kernel And we developed an organization and then along came daylight open daylight and open NFV and others And then we have a whole bunch of New ones this week that learn from them and learn from us and said oh we like what you do We can fine-tune that a little bit. That's the whole point of collaboration is to keep learning and growing and Fine-tuning right those models so that it works better Yeah, it's funny and no one ever talks about free right open source is not about free and we've been doing this It's about cloud open open transparent collaboration. Yeah, and I think even more from from where I sit It's really about the speed of innovation Which is just unprecedented in how quickly this can move and there's just there's no Question about a well-organized group Motivated group and enthusiastic group will always it seems outperform kind of a small independent You know within a company, so it's really interesting people right used to joke open open sources free like a puppy, right? It was not the old joke But now it's about innovation it is about innovation and and you can you can see the Openness of this through the the change of license models over the years right start out GPL because everybody said oh you got to incentivize people to contribute back Well, everybody's gone to these more liberal licenses right the derivations of the BSD's and so forth because they found you Don't have to force people to give back and it's because of the speed of innovation Things are happening so quickly and developing so quickly look at open stack Look at how many projects there are within open stack started out with two right five years ago, too now. We're up above 25 That is rapid change and rapid innovation if you try to go off and do that on your own you want to fork You're lost you can't keep up right each release of open stack has had 400 some odd Features right every six months try to do that on your own try to fork and do your own little community doesn't happen so that's the incentive right and So just snowballs it keeps growing bigger and bigger and bigger But what about the management of that and and the risk of it going a different direction or sometimes we hear you know People have concerns with if it's a IBM or an HP or EMC whomever pick your pick your big whale You know gets involved are they suddenly derailing kind of the pureness of the of the openness? Randy last year at open stack summit Randy bias was talking about you know some issues He had with kind of governance and direction And that could be better done talk about those kind of challenges when you've got all these people and hundreds of projects all Running, you know running as quickly as they can well That's that goes back to the governance models right and with open stack I think we picked a good one and I think it actually shows when you can have the critics speak out right and And save what their qualms are and we try to address those but one thing to look at is When you join an open-source project make sure that it's it's not controlled by any one single entity and in fact in our technical committee one of their criteria when they look at Spinning up a new effort is they want to make sure that the collaboration is is broadly right not just a single company and If you do that then it balances self out over time right so you won't see any single entity controlling it So I want to shift gears a little bit. We talk a lot on the cube about people processing tech And we talk a little techs kind of the thing that brings us all together But we all know process is difficult and people are it's probably the hardest part of any kind of innovation From your perspective having been around the block a few times in terms of people managing Open source within their own employee base I mean it's obviously a great a source of great pride when people contribute and you see it at these shows where There's rock stars and it was excited to meet the guy that wrote whatever But if you're managing that person in their next unit of work, how do you how do you continue to feed that? The the goodness of them working on an open source project versus I got I got work done that we need to do for the company as well How does that manage? What are some of the best practices you've seen out there? so so that's a very good topic because We call those the hidden influencers because in the community the those put the managers that Manage those engineers are typically hidden and so we started up an effort that's turned into our product work group To pull those people and get them involved right so we're not trying We're not there trying to coerce the engineers to go work on something that's not of interest to their company We want to make sure that those interests are aligned and so by pulling those people in and having those discussions to help build out the feature list and futures They're they've got have a just they now have a say and discussion in where we're heading in part of that roadmap so The best practice that I would say here is get them involved get them part of the discussion Right, and that keeps them interested in what the engineers are working on so everybody's happy Right, and then and then I just I'm looking at your title getting emerging standards So from the other side of the table is is the enterprise CIO that's got to decide Which of the stuff he wants to buy and implement and the speed of innovation the speed of new technologies coming out It just continues to accelerate. What's your advice? The guy that's just trying to just trying to get his job done and trying to keep up and and and and you know Deliver value for his constituents in his company yet. He's just hit with this plethora of you know spark and Hadoop and and and everything else. What do you tell that guy? How do you stay on top of it? What's the right kind of level of engagement to stay informed be able to move when you have to but not just to be Overwhelmed. Yeah, so so this again another best practice that I think That open stack has done very well as they focused on the super user So they're trying not to talk to them in terms of features and text and you know get down to the bits and bytes But to get up to the message. What's the value, right? What is the value that that this software brings to your company and speak to them in terms of business? Turn those into best practice so they understand what's it going to take for me to actually consume this technology and to implement it? That's the key. That's where they spend their time. So again, it goes back to the community because we're inviting them into the community focused with the content and Message that they need to hear in their language and So they should be able to quickly spin up on that now There's also a benefit to the vendor that we've we've learned From our from our surveys and that is that the value of having those users in our community is They're now talking straight to the engineers. They're getting the straight scoop And they're also talking to the vendors. So you get get a better relationship It's no longer just a black box that you're trying to sell to the to the user But he understands what's under the cover. He doesn't want to compile the code But he understands how it works so he can implement within his organization and get better value out of it Right, that's interesting. So then his own people can work within this thing, too No, it's not it's not this I hope it works. I'm trusting you. I'm jumping in I'm jumping in with this because now he's got access to the tons exactly so and you know We've all heard the numbers of the number of people within OpenStack, right? They're close to 28 28 thousand Not all of those guys are working code if you look at it. There's only about 2,000 that are working code So it's a it's a community not just of coders But marketers and users and vendors. It's just you're bringing the whole ecosystem together and they're talking in the open And in transparent model, right? Awesome. Well, I'm Alan Clark. Thanks for joining us. I think we just call you mr. Open Source though. Okay I'm Jeff Rick. We are in downtown Seattle at the OpenStack Seattle innovation day You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching