 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2017, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, John Troyer. We're always going to give the community what they want. And I think from the early returns on day one, we brought back Mark Shuttleworth. So Mark, founder of Canonical, had you on yesterday, a lot of feedback from the community, so welcome back. Thank you, great to be here, and looking forward to questions from the community and you. Yeah, so let's start with, we love at the show, people get some of these users that are up on stage, and they get to talk about what they're doing. We were actually, John and I were catching up with a friend of ours that talked about how a private cloud, the next revisions going to use OpenStack, so really, OpenStack's been a little under the covers, in many ways, it's the composability of OpenStack now, we're going to see pieces of it show up a lot of places. We've heard a lot about the telco places, maybe talk about some of the emerging areas, enterprise customers that you find for Ubuntu and OpenStack specifically. Sure, well it seems as if every industry has a different name for the same phenomenon, right? So for some it's digital, you're going digital. For others it's essentially a transformation of some aspect of what they're doing. The telcos call it NFV, in media you have OTT as a sort of emerging threat. And the response in every case is really to empower developers, right? That's why it's such a fun time to be a software developer because the established guys realize that if they aren't already competing with Silicon Valley they're going to be competing with Silicon Valley, right? And so in each industry there's a set of challenges or labels that they give this process of unleashing developers. And it's fun for us because we get to be part of that in many cases. I think the big drivers under the hood other than the operational and economic dynamics of cloudification, I think that the really big changes are going to be machine learning which seems to be moving very quickly into every industry, right? Retailers are using it for predictive analytics on what to put in store or what to recommend online. It just has this huge effect on almost any business when you figure out how to use your data in that way. All of that is developer driven. All of that needs this kind of underlying infrastructure to power it and it's kind of relevant to every industry. For us, media is a key prospect. You know that we've done very, very well in Telco. Media is now a sort of a critical focus. Companies like Bloomberg, for example, use Ubuntu as an elastic platform for agility for the developers. They're a pretty astonishing operation, media company, but very tech centric, very tech savvy. I don't know if you've had them on the show. In retail, eBay, PayPal, it's kind of a crossover retail finance, they're all using Ubuntu in that sort of way. And then we now see the major financials who are looking at the intersection of machine learning and transaction systems effectively as the driver for that kind of change. So in our last interview, we talked about our companies making money in OpenStack and your intro resoundingly was yes. For us, certainly, yeah. One of the things we always look at is kind of the open source business model itself. Was that DockerCon a few weeks ago? It's like, okay, how do they take everybody's using Docker? How do they make money? Question I get from a number of people in the community is everybody I talk to knows Ubuntu, uses Ubuntu. When do they transition to paying for some of the products? Right. Well, so one of our key tenants is that we want to put no friction in front of developers. So many of the people that you'll meet here or that you'll meet at other developer-centric summits, their developer oriented, their creatives effectively. And so our products, our commercial products aren't really designed to kind of tax developers effectively. What we want is developers to have the latest and greatest platform, to have that absolutely free, to be able to have confidence in the fact that it can go into production. When applications get into production, a whole different set of people get involved. For example, the security guys will say, does this comply with FIPS security? And that's a commercial capability that customers get from Canonical if they want it. So we're now sort of getting a set of security certifications that enable people to take apps on Ubuntu into production inside defense industries or other sort of high security industries. Similarly, if you look at the support lifecycle, our standard public free support maintenance windows, five years, which is a long time, but for certain applications, it turns out the app needs to be in production for 10 years. And again, that's a driver for a different set of people, not the developers, but for compliance and system administration operations types to engage with Canonical commercially. So sometimes we will walk through the building and the developers love us as everything's free and then the ops guys love us because we will support them for longer than we would support the developers. Can you kind of talk about open source as a component of business models in general maybe and how you would like to see the ecosystem growing or growing and even Canonical's business model? There's a lot of, in the course of the last decade, of the industry itself, a lot of people sniping at each other. Well, open core is the way to go. Open source is not a business model. A lot of yelling. Yes. You've been around, you know it works. How do you see a set of healthy companies that use open source develop in our ecosystem? So this is a really, really interesting topic. And I'll start at the high end. If you think of the Googles and the Facebooks and the Amazons and the Microsofts and the Oracles, I think for them open source is now a weapon, right? It's a way to commoditize something that somebody else attaches value to. And in the game of love and war or go or chess or however you want to think of it, between those giants, open source very much has become a kind of route to market in order to establish standards for the next wave, right? So right now in machine learning, for example, we see all of these major guys pushing stuff out as open source. And people wouldn't really ask, you know, what's the business model there? Because they understand that this is these huge organizations essentially trying to establish standards for the next wave through open source. Okay, so that's one approach. On the startup side, it's a lot more challenging. And there I think, you know, I think we need to do two things. So right now I would say if you're a single app startup, it's very difficult with open source. Like if you've got a brilliant idea for a database, if you've got a brilliant idea for a messaging system, or it's very, very difficult to do that with open source. And I think we see, you know, you've seen the consequences of that over the years. That's actually not a great result for us in open source. You know, at the end of the day, what drives brilliant folks to go and invest, you know, 20 hours out of a day for three years of their life to create something new? Part of it is the sense that they'll get a return on that. And so actually we want that innovation, not just from the Googles and the Oracles and the Microsofts, but we want innovation from real startups in open source. So one of the things I'd like to see is I'd like to see the open source community being more generous of spirit to the startups who're doing that. That's not canonical particularly, right? But it is the dockers of the world. It is the rethink DBs was a recent example, right? So great guys with really good ideas. And we should caution open source folks when they, basically when they piss on the parade of a startup. It's a very short-sighted approach, right? The other thing that I think we do need to do is we need to figure out the monetization strategy. Selling software the old way is really terrible. There's a lot of friction associated with it. So one of the things that I'm passionate about is how can Ubuntu enable startups to innovate as open source if they want to, but then deliver their software to the enterprise market everywhere where you can find Ubuntu and you know now that's everywhere, right? Every global 2000 companies running Ubuntu, right? Whether we can call them a customer or not is another question. But how can we enable all of those innovators and startups to deliver their stuff to all of those companies and make money doing it, right? That's very good for those companies and it's really good for the startups and that's something I'm very passionate about. We've seen such a big transformation. I mean, the era of the shrink-wrapped software is gone. An era that I want to get your long-term perspective on is when it comes to internet security. So back to your first company. We had Edward Snowden in the keynote this morning talking about security and he bashed the public cloud guys and said like, you know, we need private cloud and you need to control a lot more there. Curious, any comments on what you'd like to make about his stuff, the public private era and internet security in general today? Are we safer today than we were back in 99, you know? We certainly are safer in part because of Edward Snowden, right, that awareness is the only way to start the process of getting stuff better, right? I don't think it's simplistically that you can bash the public cloud. For example, Google does incredible work around security and there's a huge amount of stuff in the Linux stack today around security specifically that we have Google to thank for, right, and Amazon and others are also starting to invest in those areas. So I think the really interesting question is how do we make security easy in the field and still make it meaningful, right? And that's something we can have a big impact on because security, like when you touch it, it can often feel like friction. So for example, we use App Armor. App Armor is a more modern version of the SE Linux ideas that is just super easy to use, which means that people don't even know that they're using it. Every copy of Ubuntu out there is actually effectively as secure as if you'd turned on SE Linux, but administrators don't ever have to worry about that because the way App Armor works is designed to be really, really easy to just integrate and that allows each piece of the ecosystem, the upstreams, the developers, the end users to essentially upgrade their security without really have to think about that as a budget item or like a work ticket item or something that's friction. Mark, any conversations around the show surprise you, excite you, there's always such a great collection of some really smart and engaged people at this show. I'm curious what your experience has been so far. Sure, I think it's interesting. OpenStack moved so quickly from idea to superstar. I guess it's like a child prodigy, right? You know, a child TV star. The late teens can be a little rocky, right? But it does seem to be, I think it will emerge from all of that as quite a thoughtful community. The folks who were a ton of people who came to these shows who were just stuffed effectively there by corporates who just wanted to do something in cloud. Now I think the conversation is much more measured. You've got folks here who really want these pieces to fit together and be useful. Our particular focus is the kind of consumption of OpenStack in a way that is really economically impactful for enterprises. But the people who I see, you know, continuing to make meaningful contributions here are people who really want something to work, whether that's, you know, networking or storage or compute or operations as in our case. But the folks who care about that infrastructure really working rather than the flash in the pan types. And I think that's a good transition for the community to be making. Can you say maybe a little more about the future of OpenStack and the direction you see the community going? I don't know. If you had a magic wand and you look forward a couple of years, it seems like we talked a lot about maybe operability and maintainability, upgradeability, ease of use. Is that, that seems to be one of the places that you're trying to drive the ecosystem? Yeah, look, one of the things that I think the community is starting to realize is if you try to please everybody, you'll end up with something that nobody can really relate to. And so I think if you take the mission of OpenStack as to say, look, OpenSource is going to do lots of complicated things. But if we can essentially just deliver virtualized infrastructure in a super-automated way so that nobody has to think about it, VMs, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks on demand, right? That's an awesome contribution to the innovation stack, right? Yeah, there are a ton of other super-shiny things that could happen on any given quarter and any given ODS. But if we just get that piece right, we've made a huge contribution. And I think for a while OpenStack was trying to do everything for everybody. Lots of reasons why that might be the case, but now I think there's a stronger sense of like this is the mission. And it will deliver on that mission, I have great confidence. It was contrarian then to say we shouldn't be doing everything. It's contrarian now to say, actually we're fine. Just we're learning what we need to be, right? Yeah, the up and flows of this community have been really interesting. I mean, NASA helped start it. NASA went to Amazon. NASA came back to OpenStack. So, you know, bringing up, yeah, yeah. Look, think about the economics of cars, right? It's kind of incredible that I can sit outside the building and pull out an app and I have a car, right? It's also quite nice to own a car, right? People do both. Right, right, right, right. The economics of ownership and the economics of renting, they're pretty well understood and most institutions or most people can figure out that sometimes they'll do a bit of either, right? What we have to do is we, at the moment we have a situation where if you want to own your infrastructure, the operations are unpredictable, right? Whereas if you rent it, it's super predictable. And so if we can just put predictability of price and performance into OpenStack, which is, for example, what the managed service is what BootStack does, also what Juju and Maz do, right? They allow you to say, I can do that, I can do that quickly and I don't have to go and open a textbook to do it, right? Or hire 50 people to do it. That essentially allows people now to make the choice between owning and renting in a very natural way. And I think once people understand that that's what this is all about, it'll give them a sense of confidence again. Curious to your viewpoint on the future of jobs and tech. We talked a little bit before about autonomous vehicles, has the opportunity to be a great boon from a technology standpoint, but could hollow out, you know, this massive amount of jobs globally. If that kind of technology has technology, enabler of some of these things. Do we race with the machines? We interviewed Eric Brunyonson and Andy McAfee from the MIT Sloan School. Did you personally have some thoughts on that at places where Canonical looks about, you know, our future workforce? Do we end up with, you know, coding becomes the next blue collar job? I don't know if I can speak to a single career, but I think the simple fact is there's nothing magical about the brain, right? The brain is a mesh network of competing flows, right? And it makes decisions. And I think we will simulate that pretty soon. And then we'll suddenly realize, well, this is nothing magical about the brain. But there is something magical about humans, right? And so, you know, what is a job, right? A job is kind of how we figure out what we want to do most of the day and how we want to define ourselves in some sense. And that's never going to go away, right? That's never going to go away. I think it's highly likely that humans are obsolete as, you know, decision makers and surprisingly soon. Simply because, you know, there's nothing magic about the brain and we'll build bigger and better brains for any kind of decision you can imagine. But the art of being human, that's kind of magical. And humans, you know, we'll find a way to evolve into that time. I'm not too worried about it. Okay, last thing I want to ask is, what's exciting you these days? We've talked about space exploration a few times. Happy to comment on it. The last 12 months has been amazing to watch for those of us, you know. I grew up studying engineering. You know, you always look up to the stars. What's exciting you these days? Well, the commercialization of space, the commercial access to space is just fantastic to see sort of really dawning and credit to the Bezos and the Musks who are kind of shaking up the status quo in those industries. We will be amongst the stars. I have no doubt about it, right? It will be part of the human experience. For me personally, you know, I expect I'll go back to space and do something interesting there. It'll get easier and easier. And so I can pack my walking stick and go to the moon maybe. But right now, from a love of technology and business point of view, IOT is such rich pickings. You know, you can't swing a cat but find something that can be improved in a very physical way, you know. And it's great to see that intersection of entrepreneurship and tinkering suddenly come alive again, right? You don't have to be a giant institution to go and compete with the giant institutions that are driving the giant clouds, right? You just have to be able to spot a business opportunity in real life around you and how the right piece of software in the right place with the right data can suddenly make things better. And so it's just delicious, the sorts of things that people are doing. Ubuntu, again, is a great platform for innovating around that. It's just great fun for me to see really smart people who, you know, three years ago would say, do I really want to go work at a giant organization in Silicon Valley? Do I really want to go work at, you know, or could I have fun with something for a while that's really mine, right? And whether that's worth, you know, 12 bucks or 12 billion, who knows, right? But it just feels fun and I'm enjoying that very much, seeing people kind of find interesting things to do at the age. All right. Marc Trudelworth, I appreciate being able to dig into a lot more topics with you today and we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2017 in Boston. You're watching theCUBE.