 With it with that I want to hand this hand it over to our keynote speaker Steve O'Grady. He's a co-founder of Red Monk He's gonna talk about the power of convenience My live on the mic while I get hooked up here. Okay So as was said, let's see if this works I'm gonna talk to you about something that's a little different this morning Assuming actually fires up. Okay wonderful. So We do It's interesting presentation Okay, so we're back. So as I said, I'm gonna talk to you about something a little different this morning This is a little bit of a different version of a talk I gave at a conference that we run But what is about month or two ago? First of all for those of you who don't know me I'm Steven O'Grady in the co-founder of Red Monk for those of you who don't know Red Monk Red Monk is what we call a developer focused industry annals firm But particularly for this audience for this event It's important to say that when we use the term developer we're using that term pretty loosely, you know essentially what we're describing and What we what we research what we focus on our practitioners, right? So that might be somebody who is Front-end developer back-end developer could be a DBA could be a sysadmin in some cases it could be a designer All right, ultimately what we at Red Monk are focused on are the people out in the trenches building technology building applications building the infrastructure that powers well most of the world today and You know, this is a conversation that we are having over and over and over with people in open-source communities people using open-source products you know people taking these things or taking all the technologies that are available and building interesting things with them and You know really it is it's about convenience Now when I gave this talk originally I put this this particular image up on Twitter ahead of the event and I asked everybody, you know what the you know sort of thinking was You know, why would I include this, you know when we talk about convenience? I got a number of guesses. My favorite guess was that this was an ice cube for a giant old-fashioned Which it's not The reason I include this is that this is essentially how we used to do refrigeration Now I promise you're probably sitting there thinking I don't understand what the hell this has to do with databases But I promise we'll get there So this ultimately is how everybody used to cool all of their perishable goods You know, it's impossible to remember now because most of us I'm assuming probably all of us Have refrigeration technologies in our houses, but effectively what used to do is you used to carve this up Carve up a block of ice drop it in an ice box which is I'm assuming why my parents call the refrigerator the ice box and That's how you essentially kept things cool There's this giant block of ice and again It's sort of startling to sort of think about, you know, this is not that far away from where we are today and You know where I am I've come from Portland, Maine a couple of Peninsula's up from us They used to actually cut giant blocks out of the ice from the Kennebec River Dump them on these ships pack the ships with sawdust and actually sail this ice to India Now I can't get my mind around the economics of how that would ever make sense Let alone the physics of the fact that ice makes it from Maine to India. But again, this is how things were done Now if we fast forward a little bit This is the Southland ice company. So the Southland ice company was as you might expect a Outfit that sold the blocks of ice that we just saw. So in other words, they had these docks You drive up to dock you get a giant block of ice you take it home And you'd put it in your ice box and again that was effectively your refrigerator and They had 16 locations. They operated out of Dallas and You know, this is just what they did for years years and years and years. Hey, we sell ice and you know This is essentially our business Now most of us in business, you know, we are oriented towards what we do, right? So the Southland ice company focused on this and said hey, we make ice, right? This is our business. This is the business that we're in and everything that we do goes into making ice now around 1927 An individual who worked for this company who is known affectionately I assume is uncle Johnny had the idea that you know people were coming into the Ice shop and maybe they wanted to pick something else up, you know while they were there Maybe they wanted something besides just this giant block of ice So he made the decision To begin selling you know a couple of other perishable goods nothing super fancy eggs milk bread, so when you came in, you know for These items you could purchase them in one place This was effectively the beginning of what we now know today as a convenience store and the Southland ice company Became a brand that many of us in the US know as 7-eleven So not too long after They started selling, you know some of these perishable goods. They also looked at it and said hey, you know what? You know people are coming into our stores and asking for gas So why don't we sell them that 1928 they began selling gas You know, why did they go to? 24 hours a day if you know the 7-eleven brand part of you know what you know about that brand very likely Is the fact that they are open seven days a week 24 hours a day? 365 days a year Now they started this in 1963 They started this in 1963 at a location near the University of Texas Because as it turned out there was a football game the University of Texas played and a whole bunch of people came in the Stores which at that time were only open till 11 o'clock at night and effectively refused to leave and The sales, you know when people stayed very very late were enough that the business turned around and said hey You know what there's actually something here and that business went to 24 hours a day all the rest eventually followed suit So, you know the question that you're probably asking with all of this is what what does any of this have to do with technology? All right, and I think it's an important point because we think about again, you know, whatever your business is here You know, whatever your association whenever your role is with Postgres You are in a particular business very frequently you are focused on that business and You know one of the things that gets lost is what's convenient? Why are people you know sort of doing certain things? Why are they buying certain things and the south and I's company which became 7-eleven had a couple of core Realizations, which was hey, you know what it's more convenient for people to pick some of these you know basic goods up from us That it might be to go to a grocery store, you know, maybe we should you know extend our hours You know to accommodate that maybe we should sell other things that they naturally want at the same time Like gas so again, what does this have to do with technology more specifically? What does this have to do with Postgres, you know, which is what we're all here to talk about This is a in analogy It's a conversation that I've recounted many many times over the years But you know way back in 2005 2006 timeframe. I had a conversation with a number of people in the Postgres community and the topic was my SQL and a number of people in them in the postgres community wanted to know specifically why my SQL was growing so quickly You know they felt objectively that Postgres is a better database. It's more scalable had better features more performant Take your pick Now we can argue the merits of those claims But that was the feeling and I asked them a simple question at the time. I said, okay. Well, how do you get Postgres? And they said I you know first I don't understand. What do you mean? How do I get postgres? So just that if I'm new to the project if I want to download it Where do I start? They said oh, it's not a big deal. You go to the postgres website You know we have different builds for different distributions obviously if you want the source you can get that as well, but you know really if you just want a database and You know you just want to get up and running with it as quickly as possible easy to do I said, okay That's great. How do you get my SQL? And they said well, it's different because it's in the Linux repository. So it's just pseudo app get install my SQL and that to me was a hugely hugely important point and It's a point that you know, this is not the single out the postgres community It's a conversation that we've had over and over and over with You know essentially lots and lots of different open source projects over the years Which is that the open source project tends to focus just on the technology they tend to focus just on the project They tend to focus on the merits of that technology and that's it And my point is you know very much like we saw with the south and ice company You need to think about factors that maybe you're not considering Right, you need to think about the power of convenience and the importance of convenience in that brand Because as it played out in the technology industry many many people were picking a database that the postgres community felt You know the postgres community at least felt was technically inferior And they were picking it not because of an evaluation of the technical merits But because they can install it from a single command on the command line And again, this is anathema, you know This is a horrifying horrifying realization to so many in the open source world because you know We have been brought up in many cases to feel that the technology industry this Remarkable meritocracy were only the best technology survive and get used and all decisions are made purely on the merits of the technology itself And the unfortunate fact is is that having done this for a very long time I can tell you that not only does the best technical product not win in every case It doesn't win in most cases and this is something that you know This power of convenience is something that we all know right on some level This is not some sort of you know unique realization I think about it how it plays out in daily life that anybody actually does anybody know Sam Goody probably data myself from using this reference Okay, so a couple people at least so for the younger people the honest You don't know what Sam Goody is there was a time when you couldn't just download a track right if you wanted to the equivalent of downloading a track was you had to drive to its store and Buy a whole record probably most of the other tracks are terrible, but that was your only option all right and That option was sustained for years and years and years and decades and decades and decades because there was no more convenient alternative Now along comes this service called Napster Napster not that I ever used it, but from what I heard Was much more convenient to use much more convenient to get and as a result absolutely blew up and became this unique phenomenon and While Napster itself did not survive Napster gave us essentially the world that we have today, which is a more convenient world because ultimately it forced the companies that were You know adhering to the same Goody model To essentially give in right to us eventually, you know number of steps a number of years to get there But eventually get to the point where they would sell you DRM less tracks that you could download individually and again this power of convenience is a is a Market driver that we have all in most cases experience if it's not music Maybe it's programming languages right if you're gonna write something and you want it to be fast, you know That's pretty good. You're gonna write it in C C C plus plus there's a number of different choices we can make But in other words people don't choose PHP for that reason and yet it powers depending on whose metric you believe Something close to a third of the world's websites. Why is that? It's more convenient It's easier to pick up Caesar to use Caesar to run with and some would argue it's easier to make mistakes But the point here is is that you know, we have seen this play out in the programming language community again over and over and over again Where the languages that are really taking off are increasingly abstract, you know from the underlying metal They are therefore, you know more convenient to use The open source community has you know understood convenience all along right when we think about sort of you know The classic battle between Linux and Windows, you know a lot of that convenience a lot of that Advantage that open source enjoyed was the fact that you could get it Right and that you know, particularly in the early days when I was taking around Linux and trying to build kernels There's a pain. It's very very difficult to work with at the time Particularly relative to Windows which you know, you fired up, you know boots It's got a nice gooey you can sort of walk through and yeah, maybe some things I don't like about it But you know at the time certainly the out-of-the-box experience was superior But the convenience of open source in this case, you know took it to where it is today You know we're effectively on the cloud. It's the default operating system Now we're even seeing this play out within the open source community itself This is probably a little bit of an eye chart for you If you Google red monk open source licensing you'll probably turn up the report that has these you can read about it more detail but the point here Ultimately is is that at red monk we have tracked, you know, as I said before we look at practitioner data All right, so one of the things that we're interested in is the actual people writing source code. What licenses they choosing? So ultimately what this chart is depicting is is that if you look over a seven-year period, you know from 2010 to 2017 What you end up finding is that the trend overall is towards permissive licensing So it used to be you know back in 2010 The gpl accounted for somewhere close to two-thirds of all licenses You know later on top of that some of the more You know some of the other sort of reciprocal style or Copy-life style licenses and you're talking about a huge chunk of open source code What we've seen since is that The mit license in particular and they patchy to a slightly lesser extent You know have effectively tripled or doubled in terms of their share Now still tons of reciprocally licensed assets out there So it's not like the gpl is going away in case there are gpl advocates in the audience We're gonna Get all up in arms about this But the simple fact is is that if you look at the trend line over time What we're seeing is a trend line towards permissive Now, what does that say, you know, why is you know, why am I bringing that up now? One of the things that we hear from open source developers in terms of why they're selecting these licenses Is that they're simply more convenient if I attach the mit license, you know to a project You know my responsibilities with respect to that code and with respect to You know essentially, you know trying to manage that project and trying to manage my responsibilities around that That source code over time are minimal You know contrast that versus the gpl and certainly the agpl I have a much stronger set of responsibilities Now we can argue and many have, you know philosophically about Which is better for open source and sort of what's the appropriate license? I don't have a personal stake in that But what I can tell you is that all of the data that we look at this this data comes from black duck There are other sources that basically say the same thing Is is that this is a style of license that is increasingly popular and it's increasingly popular in our opinion because it's more convenient for developers Now that's the good news The bad news Is that the even more convenient thing is to not license your project at all Now, you know many point out. So this is github's numbers Um, and you see basically it's somewhere around 20 percent of projects are carrying a license Now many people point out That uh, and i've done this myself That a lot of the source code on github are just throw away things that people are, you know posting up there for their own Reference so they can find it later. It's nothing that actually needs, you know a license attached to it Because they don't necessarily intend for it to be used and sort of as a popular project But the fact is is that you know at the scale that you you know see with github There are a lot of projects out there that should have licenses that don't And they don't have licenses because the most convenient thing for developers is to not pick anything at all So, you know lest you sort of walk away from this presentation thinking that convenience is you know just a sort of universal good It's not you know definitely comes with some costs But again think about how this is played out, you know from you know different markets over time Right siebel, you know years and years and years ago, you know when I was a systems integrator We were running around siebel is a dominant force in the customer relationship management software market And All of a sudden, you know, you have this upstart You know which in the course of you know a very very brief span of time relatively speaking You know blew up and you know sort of ipo and became the business that we know today a sales force And how do they do that? Well, it's a much more convenient argument If you're you know installing on-prem crm software, you have to have all sorts of conversations about hardware platforms operating systems Implementation. Oh, and by the way half the implementations fail If you go in and you have a conversation for sales force, it's do you have a browser? Right and obviously this is not unique to sales force You know, this is essentially the argument of every software service company on the planet But the point here I think is pretty clear, which is that the convenient applications over time are the ones that you know tend to Carry the day same thing with hardware Do we have anybody from del in the room? Okay, that's good Del You know in del to its credit, you know, it's trying to essentially adapt to a very new environment But del was you know, effectively Had its lights taken out from under it, you know by the amazon web services business Because as efficient, you know as del's supply chain was and it was justifiably regarded as one of the best in the world At just in time assembly and assembling Pieces of hardware really quickly and shipping it the best you could hope for the best Absolutely best you could hope for is drop ship, you know make it there in a day or two Then you have to rack it stack and find a network, you know image the the hardware, etc. All right So best case you're talking about days You know amazon web services comes along and says well, hey, that's interesting. How about 90 seconds? All right Now certainly in the early days and I know there's some folks from amazon web services here And I'm sure they would acknowledge this as well in the early days of service It was a pain the ass Now I remember firing up one of the ec2 instances shortly after it launched and just trying to wire dns to it was a chore So it's not as if this technology did not come with drawbacks And in a vacuum if you have a very powerful physical server and a sort of relatively equally powered Virtual one You know the physical service probably going to carry the day because it's you know more reliable and so on You're probably going to get more consistent performance and so on But it doesn't matter because it's less convenient And that convenience is huge, you know in terms of in a sort of understanding Why things get used and how they get used and the relative trajectories of the physical hardware businesses And the cloud businesses that have come along after them. I think speak to this power So Again one of the one of the conversations we have with open source projects over all the time is that you know Convenience is something of a spectrum It's sort of where you sit As we talked about in the case of linux in windows, you know one of the principle and in my opinion This is certainly my opinion alone Primary advantages that open source enjoyed over proprietary competition was was just that that it was more convenient You know, you could have in many cases a technically inferior product But it was easier to get so i'm going to use it You know as we you know sort of talked about in the case of minusql So, you know if we're looking at this convenience spectrum, you know Why does something like postgres in many cases, you know, certainly in the early days get used in a versus oracle? Well, it's more convenient to get But here's the thing, you know this is that You know for you know a lot of open source communities have not adapted to the reality There's now something more convenient than that because what's more convenient than sort of downloading installing You know keeping up postgres not doing any of that at all All right, you know having you know effectively somebody do that for you And you know, that's why if you talk to the folks from amazon as i'm sure the speaker after me will will Address the two fastest growing products in the history of that service You know consecutively have been redshift and subsequently or warl. There's a reason for that They're convenient. They're easy to get Now think about this, you know, so I I gave a talk Uh, I don't know that it was the most popular talk. I don't know that the Community enjoyed hearing it, but I think it's important I gave a talk to the Folks in the patchy software foundation last year Now the patchy software foundation most of you i'm sure are familiar with it if you're not It's essentially big tent has lots and lots of different projects They have a a pronounced ethos a governance process that has been proven over time And they are an incredible wealth of software It's you know kind of shocking to think about now But if you go back to the days prior to open source, you know the assets of the patchy software foundation has would be You know worth billions and billions of dollars You know, that's how good some of the software is That's how widely it's used and certainly that's reflected in some of the people who have commercialized it and been quite successful in doing so So, you know from a strict wealth standpoint or value standpoint, I should say Uh, the patchy software foundation is a remarkable achievement But think about this again from the user perspective in terms of convenience If I want to assemble an infrastructure that uses some of these projects, okay, great I now have to figure out, okay, which sort of a patchy project does what I want Um, what are these sort of competitive projects? I might want to look at Maybe I have to sort of bake those off Then I have to sort of bring them back Integrate them, you know, find some way to wire all us together Find someplace to stand it up find someplace to run it And then hopefully find some somebody who's going to at least stand behind the individual components because it's unlikely I'm going to find somebody who's going to essentially commercially back all of the individual pieces I require That's kind of a chore, right? I mean, that's not the the simplest argument In the world to make, you know from a sales standpoint now think about option b What if I just had everything in one pane of glass? And you know, hey, I don't really have that many choices to make I don't have to stand everything up myself. I don't have to protect it myself So, you know, this is not an advertorial for amazon web services It is rather an encouragement to all of you if you are in the postgres community If you are using postgres for your own business To really think about a basic question Which is how much time do you spend thinking about convenience? Because again, this is something that we all know we all understand This is not a difficult argument to make You know when I go out and have talks with our clients or when I give talks at events like this You can walk through abcde And you know the linear progression is pretty clear You can talk to people on paper and say do you think this is important? Do you understand why this is important and everybody nods and says yes And then when you sit back and you ask them Okay, so how many meetings have you had? About your product your service your project That are just and explicitly and exclusively about convenience and the answer is always zero So the question I would leave you with then all of you Is just this you know, how much time do you think About you know, how much time do you spend thinking about convenience? And how can you spend more moving forward? And with that I'm done and out of time Thank you so much appreciate the time