 Hi, this is your host, Sapna Bhartiya, and welcome to another special edition of Let's Talk, which was meant to be recorded at Open Source Summit, but our guest today, Rob Hershville, CEO and co-founder, Reckon. You couldn't make it there because there was a conflict. So we are doing a post-recording after the show. Remotely, Rob, it's great to see you again. I missed you at the summit. Swap, it's always a pleasure and such a great community at the Open Source Summit. It really is an impressive event. It was an impressive event and I had a ton of discussion, a ton of interviews there and talking to those folks and seeing how a strong Open Source continues to go there today, though it has so new challenges now. A lot of folks, they are using Open Source, but they don't realize it, and that brings us to the very early days of my own journalism where we used to tell, hey, this is how you should use Open Source and this is how you should get back. But that's a topic for a totally different show altogether. Today, what I do want to talk to you about is that if you look at just, if you have a very narrow view, look at just CloudNeti, we're not that word in general, all the word in general. What do you think? What are the factors that played a role in adoption of all these CloudNeti technologies? Because when you go there, all you see two events like KubeCon, all you see is Open Source, Open Source, Open Source. So talk about what has driven this adoption of Open Source in CloudNeti world. And Kubernetes is one of those projects. There are several projects. Linux is another great example where the degree of collaboration that's empowered by Open Source is really the differentiator. There are certain types of projects. There are certain events in the industry in which the ability of people to collaborate is a hyperpower for being able to produce really high quality products, get a lot of adoption, really meet people where they need to be. And when that happens, when it works, it is transformative. And the only way that can work is when the source is open, when the parties can actually come together, collaborate, work together, work on their use cases together, that type of sharing is really empowered by Open Source and the way Open Source projects work. And so it really is something that when it happens, it's magical and it does transform the industry. What I wanna talk to you about is that just because something is Open Source does not mean it's a perfect solution for a specific use case or a special company. Just the way we pick any solution doesn't matter whether it's proprietary or not. There are a lot of things we look at when we evaluate that solution for our use case. Are there any criteria that an Open Source project should meet when it doesn't matter whether it's enterprise customer or startup, they are considering using an Open Source project for their own services and products? You know, a lot of people will tell you, and I think it's a safe answer, but I don't think it's a complete answer. They'll tell you that you wanna find a healthy, vibrant multivendor community for a project. But in my experience, while that is often a very good sign of a durable project, especially a foundational project, the way those projects evolve, they don't start that way. It's very unusual for that to happen. A lot of times they happen, a project evolves out of having a small team with a strong vision of how to solve a problem. And, you know, the ability of that project to meet your needs and match your vision is actually almost as important or more important than if it has a hundred vendors supporting it. You know, because that's really what drives things forward. And one of the things that we've seen, people look at the landscape and love to, you know, point to the landscape as a failure or a problem. In a lot of cases, it's showing a very healthy ecosystem around where there's a lot of different ideas coming and going as people build off each other and work together. Sometimes we'd like to be able to say, can't these projects just get along and play? The thing that comes to mind because of my interests in edge and infrastructure side is, you know, we have at least four edge-focused Kubernetes distros at this point. And it would be great to think that there would be only one of those. But the way open source works is that it allows us to have a passionate subgroup of people who are gonna work on ideas and share, you know, even if they don't share code, they're sharing ideas, they're looking at each other's use cases, they're looking at how they're solving problems. And eventually one or two of those will likely emerge as a leader and people will get behind that as a component or it's possible that, and this is perfectly fine, that you can have one vendor maintaining an open source project for perpetuity. And at that point, they're gonna be able to sustain the project and that would be just fine. Customers and people using open source need to consider that the source being open is a bit of a defense for the long term and being able to sustain the project. But it doesn't have to be that it's all, you know, big multi-vendor projects or even big, you know, the biggest vendor, their projects don't necessarily win the market. Matter of fact, a lot of times they don't. Just because, you know, as we said, it's open source does not qualify to become an ideal solution. Sustainability of that project is very important and that sustainable can come either through a larger community behind it or very strong commercial model behind it. And I feel that commercialization is very, very critical for the survival or success of open source. Without that, it will not succeed. So can you also talk about the role commercial players, you know, it doesn't matter whether they have their own code base or not, they play in success and adoption of open source technologies. Oh, that's a really good point. And one of the reasons why we talk about projects having multiple vendors or multiple players or a big company behind them is because we care about the sustainability of the project. It's a shortcut for the sustainability of the project. And so anybody using open source should be asking themselves, how is this code being maintained, right? And even more importantly, how am I as a user contributing to that code being maintained? Either financially or by advocating for it, by contributing code, right? Sustaining that project and that community in some way becomes really, really important. And that's really the secret for how you should be looking at these projects. It's, you know, what is the sustaining model and is it sufficient? A lot of projects don't need legions of developers doing the work. They need, you know, high expertise, committed group who has a financial funding model that lines up around the project's durability. And I think that's a mistake that people make. They think that every project that they look at needs to have some deep and wide support base. It's, you know, a lot of cases, you don't, a small team who understands the area very well and has the right support and financial model can really move mountains from a project perspective. But I also want to talk about the purely commercial aspect because, you know, with a lot of players, they don't have all the resources go home. The thing is that open source is often free, but it can become expensive over time because, no, I mean, I'm not saying in a bad way, but the fact is it's all day one problem. You can get it started very easily. You download the code, get it started. But you need a lot of developer resources to actually, you know, maintain it, update it, patch it. If you want to need ad services, so there are a lot of commercial players, they specialize in that. And sometime it frees your own resources in a lot of other things. So talk about the role commercial players play in, you know, success of open source. Yeah, commercial, the commercial component here is a really significant piece to making all this work because what we're talking about with a commercial, let me take a step back in answering this. If you think of open source as a group of developers working in their free time to write this code and it's a passion project for them and you're using it as a commercial entity, then I think you've really missed the how software in general, not just open source, but software in general gets propagated and built. What you wanna be able to do and the most success of any software, commercial or open source, is when you have a shared group of development resources working across all of the users of that software. Right, and that's how proprietary software works. It's how good open source works. You are supporting by paying for licenses and support of that software. And then the development effort for that listens to your needs, listens to the needs across the user base and then builds and supports that software. That's actually how innovation happens. If you are funding only things that you need or developing only things that you need, you're not actually building a sustainable software project, definitely not a software product. The way the whole system works is when people are funding work it gets shared across many use cases. And that is actually a commercial model because most people don't care about your specific use case. What you need, you are voting for your needs by funding that work. And so that there is a very important commercial aspect to making sure that your needs are met on an ongoing basis. And then if you're doing it right and you should investigate this regardless of what type of software, making sure that what you're getting is built for a lot of different users in a broad set of use cases. If you're doing things that are just for you, that's custom software development and ultimately is gonna be much more expensive for you whether it's open source or not. That's just the reality of software. Can you also talk about the role that you have seen that foundations play in success of open source? It's an underappreciated role. I spent, I believe it was five years on the open stack board. So I'm very familiar with how a foundation, what it can do and what it can't do from an open source perspective. And people will correctly understand that the role of a board or foundation is very driven by the marketing and the brand. It's the main lever that the foundations have is around how the brand of the software gets used which sounds like a very weak use case but the reality is what it really does is it polices the commercial aspects around the project. And so one of the biggest dangers for an open source project is that the people, it gets popular and then the companies that are around the project will make claims about using that project that are not true. And the foundations are actually able to police the behavior, the engagement, the marketing, what's said about the projects. They actually have a lot of behind the scenes influence to make sure that people don't fork. They help resist forking pressures. They resist vendors misrepresenting. They resist vendors basically working against each other. It is an absolutely essential role because fundamentally in a successful open source project at the foundation level, these are competitors trying to collaborate on a shared community good. And the foundation polices how that is shared. They have to create enough competition and opportunity for everybody. And they have to make sure that people don't take the pieces and run or guard things that they think are proprietary. And that role of it's not a policeman. They don't have the engagement. It's a lot more carrots. They can use marketing as a stick and not allow people to be part of the brand. And so there's a very careful balance to act as a diplomat and negotiator inside of this potentially delicate environment and choosing how all those things get set up. I do also like when foundations invest some resources in doing some of the toil for projects and making sure that there's tests and training documentation, right? I do think that really successful foundations have done that investment also to make sure that some of the things that sometimes vendors lean on the community and become lost, that certifications is another example. Those are very, very important roles for foundations also to take on because it provides sort of a base strength for the community that the users really depend on. Can you talk about the role that companies like Racken play in this whole ecosystem to enable customers, users, leverage all these open source technologies? I think that that's a really important point in understanding that when people use open source, their ability to consume it in a consistent, repeatable way really becomes important. So Racken provides infrastructure automation software. We help companies run data centers from the ground up as software, so they run it. We provide the infrastructure as code scaffolding and support to make sure that that's repeatable. And in an open source framework, and this is true actually, even for the proprietary systems, whether they be hardware or things like VMware, but when we're talking about running this type of infrastructure, the ability to have a consistent, repeatable process and reuse other people's work is absolutely essential. So one of the things that we do that really makes open source much more accessible for our customers is the infrastructure as code pieces allow us to have standardized pipelines for deploying these open source operating systems. And that means that you can adopt the latest, you can stay on the current releases, you can move faster, you can collaborate when things change. One of the things that people need to remember about open source is it's a very dynamic environment. And you need to be able to have your own processes, your own ability to take new patches. You have to be much more resilient in how you adopt these systems because you're not gonna get five years or 10 years of patches and upgrades or changes like that. If you're adopting open source, the best strategy is to have a very dynamic infrastructure where you can quickly roll forward, where you can stay up with the community. If as soon as you drop behind the community, you're running into support risk for yourself, you're running into security risks or governance risks. So what we help customers do across the board, but especially valuable for open source is use standard pipelines that work across all of our customer base and are very dynamic and fast to stay up with the latest changes in the current revs of all the software. That in itself enables you to consume these products and these projects much more effectively because as things change as new pieces come out, you can stay right up with the latest components. And that is one of the best ways to actually to support the communities that you're involved in, but also to protect yourself against the dynamic environments that open source enables. And it's actually what people want. They want that innovative, active community part. And if you don't have a way to bring that into your infrastructure, you're not as well positioned to take advantage of the communities and also the price savings, the cost savings from open source. Rob, thank you so much for sitting down with me and talk about this important topic. As I said, I wish we could have done that at the summit, but I look forward to chat with you again, maybe in person. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you.