 Hi, this is Yohu Sapin Bhartiya. And today we have with us once again, Lynn Son, Director of Open Source at solo.io. Lynn, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, thank you so much. It's so excited to be here, Swap. Yeah, I have talked to you so many times and we always bump into each other at events, but I never got time to sit down with you and learn about your own journey. So talk a bit about your tech journey. Yeah, so I started, honestly, I started my college without anything to do with technology. I was a designer or architect to design buildings or houses. It's interesting. When I started to my graduate school, that's when about the technology was at a peak around 2000. So technology was a half field. So I decided to, you know, why not start in technology? So I went down information science as my graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill. It just provides me an amazing opportunity to see how technology can influence and change people's life, but it wasn't my first choice during college. So it was pretty interesting. When you came to learn about open source, what was your first project that you got involved with and what attracted you towards open source? There are three questions there. Depends on how you want to look at it. Right after graduation, I went to work at IBM, which is like the largest employer in my local area. Super cool company really love it. For the first few years where I was at IBM, I didn't have any opportunity to be exposed to open source. Right about maybe my seven, eight years into IBM, I got the opportunity to work on this project called Apache Geronimo. So IBM back then made acquisition to a company called Glucode, I believe, which the Intel company is built on top of Apache Geronimo. And my manager started to ask me, look, we have this new cool project, which is an Apache project, do you want to work on it? So that was my first exposure to open source projects. So I kind of grew my ladder to become a contributor to Apache Geronimo, become a maintainer and also like a PMC member. I believe that's what they call in Apache is project management committee as part of the Apache project. So since then I've grown a lot of interest in open source project. So after I've worked on Apache Geronimo, I worked on another IBM primarily sponsored open source project called Apache Aries. And then I started to work on Istio. So I feel like I was very fortunate in working on a bunch of cool open source project along the way. From early on, you were involved with open source itself so I cannot ask, hey, can you draw a comparison between working with the, you know, in a proprietary company organizations versus open source? But if I may ask you, since those days to today, how have you seen the evolution of open source communities? Yeah, so I've actually observed a lot of evolution of open source community, primarily from the diversity perspective. The first two open source project, I was primarily involved. It wasn't very vendor diversified, which is probably need to, none of the two projects was very popular at the end. So it was mostly IBM dominated open source projects. It doesn't have like, I mean, it has a nice Apache umbrella under Apache Software Foundation. But at the end of the day, most of the contributors are coming from a single vendor, which is IBM. So these days as people, you know, go into cloud native, people go to microservices, I feel as people running their applications in cloud across different, you know, more than one cloud, more than one environments, I feel that really fast innovation and collaboration within the open source community. So now these days, when I look at open source community, not only I look at how active the community are, I also look at the diversity aspect of the community, because I really believe that's what's making the open source project really sustainable. One example I would give is, I think Apache Meisos, you guys probably all know very, very popular open source project back then and very successful. They speak on a lot of the conference, but we started to see some red flag with the project because the diversity of the contributor and the vendors willing to invest into it. And that leads to later on, you know, Kubernetes when the market and everything, yeah. What role do you see these foundations are playing or have played in making open source, not only more popular, but also making corporations more comfortable with consuming open source, because when it is a company-owned project, sometimes there is a fear, and we are seeing this a lot of days where companies can change the license, they kind of, you know, feel some heat from the market and competitions. So can you talk about the role of these foundations? Yeah, so I think these role of foundations are super, super critical for any open source projects. Typically as we talk to our users who are looking at consuming these open source projects, many of them do care about is the project resides in a neutral, vendor-neutral foundation while they can trust. So most of the user would trust a big foundation like CNCF and Apache because they have very well reputation among the user community. So for instance, on the Istio project, we literally experienced that, right? Because you all know Istio was not part of a neutral foundation for a very long time until last year when Google decided to donate the Istio and the trademark of Istio to CNCF. So since then, we've actually seen a lot of more contribution coming to Istio from different other big vendors. For instance, Microsoft, right? Microsoft actually just announced their support for Istio during KubeCon last week. So these are the key players we're attracting as part of an open source project which further solidify the confidence in users' mind when they're picking a service mesh solution. So the other thing I would add is CNCF as a vendor-neutral foundation providing like superior marketing opportunity for open source project. Since you kind of worked with an open source company, so this might be a tricky question for you, but are you still seeing some challenges that organizations face when it comes to embracing open source technologies? Or you feel that, hey, no, we are on the right path, very low, it's very easy to get started, everybody's using, or you still feel, hey, these are apprehensions that companies still feel when they try to embrace open source? Yeah, I think it really depends on what type of open source projects they are embracing, right? If you're looking at some simple tooling, like Docker, right, very intuitive to use, but some of the infrastructure framework, particularly like Kubernetes or service mesh, you might be able to use it and think out yourself, but you may not be able to do the longer term support yourself, right, because that needs money and the team and resources, how the right team to staff that, it's not easy. So this is why sometimes it makes sense to partner a vendor who is specialized to be able to support you, to be able to maybe build some differentiation for you, specifically for your business needs. Then thank you so much for taking time out today and share your journey and also share great insights about open source communities. Thanks for sitting down with me and I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Yeah, it's so much pleasure to talking to you. Thank you so much, Swap. Hopefully I'll run into you in person soon, yeah.