 Hi, this is Jo Sapin Bhartia and we are here at Open Source Summit in Dublin and today we have with us once again Ibrahim Adat VP of strategic programs at the links Foundation. Ibrahim is great to have you on the show. Yeah Thank you very much and welcome to open source summit Yeah, we have been like it's been years since we sat down and in person. So we have been doing a lot remotely So it's good to Do these things in person again, which also means it's good to see these events in person So you have of course, you know, it's been third or fourth day I don't know which day it is today Which is funny but right because sometimes a day starts before the events, you know, there are other co-hosted events as well What kind of crowd are you seeing now as compared to early days? Especially from the perspective how many people are using open source where so they understand how open source work because we'll be Talking about open source program office also, which also means to understand, you know The companies how very well they understand. So talk about the crowd you have seen here. Sure. So I think it's quite interesting Because of a couple of reasons the whole situation. I mean First if we look at the Ospo survey from the to do group at the links Foundation year over a year I think they started doing the survey in 2018. So we have 2018 data 2019 2021 and the other and there are 22 Survey season if you look at all this data, it's always positive trending for all the source We need more companies are established on source program offices more companies are aware of the benefits of open source There's more adoption and there's more contribution and this is very much consistent with the data that we see They in and they out working really with dozens and hundreds of organizations, whether it's on the cloud computing arena, whether it's on AI or Many other tech technology verticals across the next foundation. So today, it's really Increased adoption then in the year before and then the previous year it's increased consumption and increase contribution to open source. So it's Really an impressive increase across the board in all facets related to open source software, right? Also, when we look at the crowd at the open source summit, of course, there are people who do, you know Understand consume or use open source or contribute back to open source Let's look at outside of the open source summit or even outside of the open source circle Of course, a lot of efforts are going Not being done by the length foundation itself and there are other efforts going on But what kind of trends here? I mean you did touch upon that, but I just want to go into deeper that we are talking about open source program office a lot these days The irony is that a lot of companies they are using open source without realizing it Which also means that first of all, they actually do not even know how to properly use Consuming is different than using and then how also become part of the community to give back because sometime giving back Seems to them like giving something away with the fact is it's an ecosystem You don't give anything back, you know, you just make no things better for yourself. So talk about, you know What kind of trends are you seeing in the market where people companies are actually understanding or you are still kind of Feel that they still need education about it. So definitely on the education front, it's kind of consistent You know the more education you inject and put in the market and there's more awareness and then there's more demand on open source in terms of pool and then there's more demand on the training and so on but kind of to take a step back typically when you look at any given organization kind of Request and use of open source. It's either bottom up the developers Seeing some components libraries framework platforms that are beneficial to whatever they're building in their stack whether it's a service or or or product they go and Developers kind of download the code use it try it out Get convinced that this is kind of from a functionality perspective. It fits the need and they start using it So it's kind of bottom up from the gene all the way up Or it can be the other way around meaning an executive that realizes the CTO or VP of product originating They realize that hey, you know, there's this platform or library that's critical to what? we're building and it's open source and they the other team to go and use it and The really interesting trend is this is all great but at some point when you have a lot of use within your organization and Consumption different pockets contributing to open source to be really highly efficient and to get the best ROI or your open source Use you need to have the body that Coordinates all these efforts and this is what organizations today called it Osfo short for open source program office It's basically a program office that manages open source within an organization and it is responsible for the use contribution Compliance and community aspects of interacting with open source and today if you look at technology companies I pretty much every single one of them has an open source program offices and I personally created a couple of them and I managed and you know my last job at Samsung research was as the leader and basically founder of the open source program office and I spent six years doing this so there are a lot of organizations out there doing this and it's Even outside of technology, I mean you can be in the transport business in the Healthcare business and within governments a lot of governments have actually established units whose whole purpose is to Manage the open source use within the government offices. So this is really a very interesting trend We've been watching it for a couple of years, but now it's been extremely strong in terms of companies actually Executing on this and in the past few months, we've published two ebooks At the next foundation one is called enterprise open source And this looks at best practices for organizations using open source software and contributing to it And the second one is in relation to all schools what are the roles and responsibility of an Ospo and how you set up in Ospo and a lot of our Interactions with the hundreds of companies across the next foundation we realize back to your first form back There's a lot of need for education. You know people are looking for practical guidance. I mean, it's all nice to sit to a motivational Presentation about the need to have such an effort happening with an organization and it's completely different thing to have Guidelines of a template. Thank you. Here's the 10 things you can practically do to help your organization And we really focus on the practical aspects of building Ospo's programs Building efficiencies in using and contributing to the source. If you look at the company, of course, they are big companies And they they are understanding the importance of open source and they do have open source program offices But then there are a lot of you know companies who are still trying to you know get into that bandwagon Another set of challenges and new companies which are coming up the problem with those companies They don't have either resources to have a dedicated program office CEO CTO That's you know whole team is five or six people, but they are building some amazing technologies So which which of these two, you know buckets you see more challenging and more important to address Your statement is true. And you know, definitely I agree that you know a lot of the large company in a world established I mean if you look at the Early adopters of open source like IBM in year 2000. We are going to invest one billion dollars in Linux That was at a time where most companies didn't know what is Linux, right? So you have like the Google the Facebook the Microsoft and all these large companies that are extremely well established And they are lies the benefits of using and contributing and building communities around these technologies And then you have a lot of these smaller companies that Really are in terms of size. They don't have the resources to have an Osmo program office So in that setup, it's really a virtual Osmo meaning, you know, you don't have an educated Swapnail or ebra whose job is to focus on this however the responsibilities of Managing the intake and the contributions are spread across a number of individuals and this model is well Documented in the recent three e-book that we published where we say there's not a single model that fits every company Every company is different. They operate in different vertical. They have different constraints So there are maybe seven eight different models in which you can set up a most as for Kind of the middle intersection, which you called, you know, the cost model I am not a big fan of this model personally. This is again my personal opinion not anything You know in relation to my current or any previous employers I think you know companies in that space are kind of struggling in Monetizing how their products that are fully based on open source and they're trying to solve the monetization problem by Playing around with the licensing and I don't think this is kind of the right way of addressing the problem It's really kind of the business problem and not licensing problem. There are of course a lot of companies that Succeeded extremely well to open source. So it's not kind of an open source license problem. It's the monetization problem So I tend to focus my time on helping companies You know all these small startup companies, especially in the field of AI and data where I'm operating at the next generation in better understanding their ecosystem and better figuring out how to build their Software and you know their contributions and build the community as for the larger programs You know at these large massive companies that are for instance, you know Platinum numbers and explanation. I try to work with them on the scaling issues You know how we can scale and have our offices and our open software Open source software investment scale to support, you know, the 70,000 employees we have so it's kind of a spectrum of activities and it's Super interesting and very engaged in building across all levels, right? you've got a very interesting point, which is about computer trying to Solve a business problem through licenses And sometimes they point at the cloud providers because you know what? They can take my software offered as a service and I cannot compete at that scale But if you look at the just a Linux space desktop Linux Ubuntu how many derivatives are there handers of derivatives of their for Ubuntu Fedora? Sousa has their own derivatives, but then you know, it's not you know So this is not a new problem in this problem. I mean, that's the whole beauty of open source You can throw the code and you can do whatever you want to do But if you're really good at your job your company will succeed in offering support and everything else. So Looking at trying to use license to solve a business problem is kind of you know against the whole idea of open source Because to me open source is more about collaborating It's not about code that much is more about getting people to collaborate on something and when you compromise on that You kind of also lose the trust and faith, you know You release a product and suddenly you change the license next day because you're like, hey We cannot compete in the market, which is actually bad, you know, so but this is happening a lot these days So you have been in this space for so long Are you concerned about this problem or you think that over a period of time things will settle down and people will Realize that no the right way to approach is open core open source model very interesting and actually there's a lot to unpack in your in your statement there, so I Think like any other market places open source software and the ecosystem is the marketplace so from from my perspective Coming to enter the open source ecosystem as the consumer of open source software, you know, you're relying on others To provide you a software now that software is free meaning you don't have to pay license fee for it But of course there are different responsibilities That you have to do and they're very simple and very similar to proprietary software You still need to comply with the licenses whether you're getting commercialized for your services You still need to do to a DNA testing you still need to do integration and everything that's very similar to relying on our proprietary technologies and Like any other marketplace when you look at any given technology sector, there are a lot of competing projects So in my domain AI and data if you're looking for a deep learning Framework there are probably around 15 of them competing in the marketplace and eventually they will filter down to two or three And that applies to a lot of technologies. So When it comes to kind of the licensing You know, and by the way your dimension of the Linux desktop, I think 2023 will be the best Year, and this is kind of an ongoing Joke because you know to take it as an example the definition of desktop has really changed over the years I mean I spend more time on my phone than I actually do on my laptop But most of the phones today, you know, they're running Android and that's Linux by definition So we are on the Linux desktop whether we realize it or not in the sense And with respect to the licensing This is kind of quite a challenge. I as I mentioned earlier. I I believe this is a business portal A challenge there are a lot of companies who succeeded in coming in and changing Kind of taking in an open source license and changing a couple sentences of it I mean this this is not a trust inviting environment to be in that's first and also it makes it very kind of challenging from a compliance perspective because You know our essay tool, you know software compliance You did software scanners that tells you the software's under this license Are they able to detect these really small nuances in a modified Apache license, for instance, right? So there are a lot of different challenges And I don't think this is something that positive in the marketplace and let the marketplace excite You know if if you're happy with that then go for it. I mean there are No restrictions. I mean if you're a company you realize that this is what it is and you're happy with it Absolutely, and if you don't like that, there are many other alternatives and eventually things will filter filter down kind of a winner and You know, not so much a winner And I prefer to leave it kind of to the market and that's it since the market are the adoptees Source let them decide what they want what they work for to pull it and everybody else will adjust and we see that on Project levels where a project is adopted and all the other three or four competing project They're not necessarily failure. I mean they contribute a lot of code They train all the people on that technology and they serve the purpose and all the contributors Migrate to doing other innovative stuff and the game of the game The name of the game is innovation. How do you? Kind of outpace the cloud provider have you know, you just need to stay one step ahead of the light What advice do you have for companies who are still at the step where there are either thinking about you know Having an open source program office at the very early stage. What tips you have for them? So they approach it in the right way, you know, if you go back 20 years and I was actually with a foundation from day one I mean, I was in the first iteration. It was called the source development labs before it merged with the free software foundation and a free software group and then rebranded into things foundation and at that time we were working to improve Linux For telecom deployment. So we needed to improve Linux from a service ability perspective performance and security and many other aspect to make it carrier grade And at that time the telecom industry thought they were very special industry They're regulated that they have government oversight and so on and over the years, you know, you had telecom industry Then you had multiple industries that followed then you had the automotive industry that is now You know today you can go and buy multiple car that and their infotainment system is links and based on links And open source software to about 85% and today as you mentioned earlier the banking sector Which they think they're super special because they're you know, they're finance and they're regulated and so on and eventually Everybody is using adopting and I think it's a matter of time and that matter of time depends really a lot on Your ability to understand as an organization that there are multiple ways To create software one of them is created by yourself and manage it and you get it through suppliers And the other way is to collaborate with others and use that massive Investment and software at external R&D. So you have your internal R&D and then you can go to other proprietary companies and commission software and that's also internal R&D, but there is also this multi-billion dollar Collaboration aspect that's producing tons of software that are available for use and customization And it's really a matter of understanding the system understanding the risks from their perspective Understanding the obligations and understanding, you know, how can we deploy that software? How can I maintain it? How can I work with the community on it and really a lot of education back to your initial point? There's the education at the engineering level. There's education management There's a lot of education at the exact level as well. So all of these together kind of are factors to play But eventually I think even the most conservative companies that you know They were like believing that open-source software is evil or today are one of the largest ROTs and largest contributors to open-source. So they got to that in relatively short-term time With really strong leadership and understanding of the ecosystem And so if other companies may take longer, shorter time, but eventually I think everybody is there And the point to that is a lot of companies they have anywhere between like 20 to 80 percent of their internal stacks Powered by open source. So, you know, you cannot ignore that And Brian once again, thank you so much for sitting down with me and talk about, you know Of course the importance of open source and how folks can actually embrace open source practices Within the organization through open source program offices and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you Thank you very much. So I think one note just before I drop out I would like to mention to anyone and everyone listening to to this video recording that We have a ton of free resources available at the next foundation about enterprise open source about getting started Those open source program offices about license compliance. We also have a free training available So I would really encourage you to go to our website And discover what kind of content and education that is available for you and it's all free and use it to your benefits