 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit, North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Hey, welcome back everyone here, live in LA for the Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Jeff Frick and Stu Miniman who'll be back shortly's out scouring the hallways for all the news and analysis, getting all the scuttle butt. We're here with our next guest, Brian Bellendorf who's the executive director of the Hyper Ledger Project by the Linux Foundation. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing. We were just talking before the camera started rolling about blockchain and the coolness around the hype around it. But again, the hype cycle is usually a pretext to the trend. Hyper Ledger is one of those exciting projects that, like AI, everyone is jazzed about because it's the future, right? Open Source is getting bigger and bigger as Jim Zemlin was saying. 23 million developers are growing but there's still so much work to be done. The global society is relying on Open Source. It's shaping our culture. Hyper Ledger is one of those things where it is going to actually disrupt the culture and change it potentially. And even this morning, Chinese banned virtual currencies and ICOs and all based upon blockchain. It's time to invest, right? Always invest in whatever China bans. It'll always be successful. So your thoughts. Well, first before we start, let's get into Hyper Ledger Project. It's certainly a super exciting project. People are talking about it heavily. What's going on with the project? Give a quick update. The purpose was involved and what are some of the milestones you guys have? Well, Hyper Ledger is less than two years old. It was launched officially in December of 2015. I joined in May and it was founded on the principle that, hey, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the cryptocurrency world but there might be some more prosaics, some more directly applicable applications of distributed ledger and smart contract technology to rebooting a lot of otherwise very thorny problems for industries in the world. The main problem being when you've got companies doing business with each other and then they're recording transactions and they'll have to go back and reconcile their systems to get audited books, right? And a lot of the systems out there depend upon processes that are very human processes that are prone to error, prone to corruption, right? So the idea is the more that you can pull together information about transactions into a shared system of record, which is really what the distributed ledger is. And then the more of the governance and the business processes and flows that you can automate by smart contract, the more effective and the more efficient a lot of these markets will be. So that's what hyperledger is about. Okay, so certainly the keynote was all about open sources being dependent upon and Jim Zimlin as well as Chris Dean Corbett said, you know, distributed labor, distributed control, we all know that open source. But I love the point about changing the face of capitalism because hyperledger is a term that you can almost apply to the notion of decentralized, not just distributed, but decentralized business. So the notion of supply chain, things in finance to moving goods around the world, this is interesting. This is, talk about the impact of how you got just seeing some of these applications where now a decentralized architecture, combined with distributed creates an opportunity for changing the face of capitalism. Well, let me, because the word distributed can be very loaded, right? You know, and even decentralized, right? It can be very loaded. And what I tried to popularize is the idea of minimum viable centralization, right? You know, football games and other sports games have referees, right? And when we play a game like this, well, sometimes, you know, sometimes we don't need a referee. It's just us playing pickup basketball. But sometimes we want somebody on the periphery. We all agree to who helps remind us what the rules are and throws a red flag from time to time, right? And so, did you see in industries, ranging from finance, where you're building these transaction networks to, you know, supply chains where you need to track the flow of like food and to know when food has gotten spoiled, possibly where that came from, or diamonds that have been involved in conflict diamond, you know, or other illegal activities, right? You want to know where that came from. And it involves that industry getting together and saying we all agree we have a big net interest in making our business actually follow certain rules and norms, right? And using a distributed ledger to bring that about is something that can just provide a lot of optimizations out there. So most people think of like Bitcoin and Ethereum with all this ICO buzz as the front end to really the underlying blockchain, which you're talking about. And that's kind of like, I get that fiat currency, this market develops some tulip craze, bubble, some people call it, whatever. But you're getting at something unique and this is that there's a real business value of hyper ledger. I won't say boring, but it's like meat and potatoes stuff. It's like really kind of- Prozeic is the word. Prozeic, it's like, but it's disruptive. So if you think about like the old days when we were growing up, or I was growing up, the ERP was on mini computers, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management software, those were bloated monolithic software packages. Still out there today. And they handle the so-called supply chain. So is the hyper ledger a disruption to that? Is it an augmentation of that? So to try to put it in context, the cost of sending a shipping container from China to the United States, right? Half of that is in paperwork. Half of that is because that container on average will go through 30 different organizations from the suppliers that you're assembling the goods into to all the different ports, all the different regulatory authorities, right? Out finally to where it's delivered. And if you can optimize those business processes, if you can make it so that those happen in a space where it's not about paper and fax, which a lot of that world is still ruled by today, or a bureaucrat sitting there reviewing stuff that's coming in and having to stamp it, really all that could be automated. You could cut the cost of that and take the shipping industry from what is right now a money losing industry to potentially being viable once again. So optimization is really critical for them. It's optimization, but there's also some new capabilities here. So I spent a year at the Department of Health and Human Services trying to help make healthcare records more portable for patients, right? And we wrote, I got the industry to write a ton of open source software, implemented open standards to make these records shareable. But the problem was the patient wasn't involved, right? This was about trying to take two orgs do something that all of their bean counters told them not to do, which was share patient records, because no, that's proprietary value. And the HIPA regulates all that nonsense. Exactly. So blockchains processes basically. With blockchain technology though, we can reinvent that as a patient driven process, right? We could reinvent a lot of the other business processes out there that involve personally identifiable information like the Equifax disaster, right? We could reinvent how the credit markets assess risk in individuals through blockchain technology in a way that doesn't require us to build these big central anonymous third parties that Hoover everybody's data become these massive privacy titanics, right? We can reinvent a lot of this through blockchain tech, and that's a lot of what we're working on at Hyperluxury. I was going to say, and Linux Foundation doesn't kind of be a unique place because you're used to driving these big open source projects. There's a lot of people trying to build the wrapper around the base core of blockchain to come up with their version or their kind of application, if you will, whether it be Bitcoin or whatever. But you guys are in kind of a special place based on your roots. We believe that, I mean, open standards are nice, but what really matters is common code, right? And in a world like we envision where rather than saying you've got one big network like Bitcoin or one big network like Ethereum, you've got thousands or tens of thousands of these permission networks that cover different industries, different geographies, different regions. What you need is common software so that when a developer goes to work on an application that touches one or multiple of these, they've got familiar idioms to work with. They've got familiar technologies to work with, like Go or Java or JavaScript, right? But they've got a community of other technologies have been trained up on these technologies that can help them bootstrap and launch their project and maybe even become a contributor to the open source project. So what we've figured out at the Linux Foundation is how to make that virtuous cycle go for companies, benefit commercially from it and then feedback into the project and that's what we're doing here. You mentioned the word, you can almost rethink and reimagine some of these things like the Equifax disaster. I think it's pretty of a no-brand thing. Most tech people are really seen as viable, like absolutely it's going to happen. So there's a nice trajectory vision that people are buying into because it's almost, you can see it hanging together playing out technically. What are some of the things going on in the project can you share with the folks watching about some things that you're doing to get there faster? What's going on with the community? What's some of the issues? What are some of the concerns? How do people get involved? Take some time to go build a deeper into the project. So we're not an R&D kind of free thinking kind of thing. We're about writing code and shipping and getting it to production, right? So Hyperledger Fabric just hit a 1.0. That was a signal from the developers that this code is ready to be run in production systems and for you to track digital assets with it, right? By far it does not mean it's the end of the road. It's the end of chapter one, right? But at least it's a place where the clear intent is, let's make this actually usable by enterprises. The other projects, we've got eight different projects total at Hyperledger. Some of them even compete with each other, right? But we're driving all of them to get to a 1.0 and over time all of them to talk about how they relate to each other in kind of complimentary ways. And what's the profile of developers you're getting because some people always ask, because how do, should I get involved? What can I sink my teeth into? What are some of the meaty kind of things that people are doing with it? Who's the persona that are coming in these enterprise developers, they're more traditional full stack developers? Can you give a range of some of the persona attributes? Because this is early code still, I mean this whole space is still pretty early when it comes to understanding how to use these technologies, especially at scale, kind of at a DevOps scale. A lot of the people first coming into the tech community now are fairly advanced, right? Are kind of the whiz kids, right? But we're seeing that gradually broaden out. We now are at a point where we could use developers coming in and writing sample applications, right? We could use people helping us with documentation. We're developing training materials that will be Creative Commons licensed, so everybody will be able to deliver those and as they find bugs or add features to the training, they can do that too. So we can really use anybody at this point. All right, so folks watching, get involved. Okay, get any white spaces you might want to tease them out with that you see happening. Obviously you mentioned tracking digital assets, data is assets, that's cool. Anything that's going on with data probably is a digital asset, you'd agree. What's some of the things that people could get motivated on? Can you share any insight that you might have that would motivate someone to jump in? I think any industry has these challenges of weaving their systems together with other businesses and then trying to do that in a way that holds each other to account, right? This is a system for building systems of record between organizations, right? And you running a database, me running a database, we don't get there on our own. We only get there by working with consortia, by working as a community to actually build these systems. And so I'd say every business has that challenge, whether they're engineers who felt free to go in and try to tackle that. Imagine the little extra net days when people build these networks. Similar concept where blockchain is one big collaborative network. All right, final question for you, kind of shooting for a little bit. What do you expect to happen with the community? Any thoughts on some of the goals you have as executive director? Obviously you got some hackathons for good. You're seeing blockchain being applied to some real things with 1.0. What do you see rolling out and for which some of your goals? I massively grow the developer community, both the one end of the spectrum, which is the WizKids, the hardcore developers, to move forward on kind of the leading edge of that. But really we've got to bring 100,000 developers into this space over the next couple of years just to meet the demand that's there in the industry for that talent. All right, so if I'm now an executive, I say, hey, I saw this great Cuban interview with Brian, it's awesome. Go get involved, how does someone get involved? Just jump, standard community model, just jump in. What advice would you give someone if they want to engage and participate? For every one of our projects, if you gave it an hour, you'd get to a running instance of that software, right? So fabric or sawtooth, within an hour, you should have a running four-note instance that you can start writing chain code to, which is the smart contract language, right? And then from there, getting involved in the community is a matter of joining mailing lists, joining our rocket chat channels, rocket chats, and alternative to Slack that we actually prefer. And I think you'll find a really welcoming community of other devs who want to tell you about what the projects are and want to help you kind of climb that learning curve. One of the comments is on a good note here is that Christina gave in the keynote, she says, code can shape culture. You've been in the industry a long time, you've seen the wave, you've been on the shoulders of others, and now as the open source goes to the next level, how is code going to shape the culture in your opinion? How should people start working together to take that? I would say that, almost not a moonshot, but it's really more of an imperative that culture will be changed, inclusion also is huge. Your thoughts on code shaping culture? So we've had a decline in the trust in institutions, in the United States and worldwide, not just in the last seven months since November, but actually for the last 20 years. Edelman does this survey every year where they ask you, you're trust in brands, you're trust in government, you're trust in the process, the fairness of society, and for 20 years that's been on a straight line decline. To the point where we ask ourselves, can you trust any level of government? Can you trust businesses to look out for your interest? The answer almost generically is going to be no. This is a technology that can save us from it. This is a technology that I believe can help us define the rules of the game, help us build society, but then actually automate and implement that in a way that doesn't require us to have to bribe an official or curry favor with a school official to get our kid into that school or anything like that. This is a way to try, I think, to make the world more accountable and more fair. An open source has that inclusive and staying away from the gerrymander. And I love the quote, it's so confusing now. It's like, who do you ask? Where's the source of truth? And it used to be RTFM and check the source code. Now it's, there is no manual. Who is the source? Fake news, all these bots. I mean, it's kind of crazy. So this is a call to arms, the open source. I think it is. I think it really is. Trust is a service. Okay, Brian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Executive Director for the Hyper Ledger Project. Super important project. Really a game changer, changing the face of capitalism and also continuing the trend and accelerating open source. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break.