 From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now, here's Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's all about 5G. 5G is this huge revolution. I haven't got a definitive number, but it's something on the order of 100x, improvement of speed and data throughput. There's a lot of excitement, but one of the things that Les talked about here, was actually up on the keynote, was really the role of open source. And AT&T talked a lot about open source and how important that it is, and really redefining the company around the speed of software development versus the speed of hardware development. And that's a big piece of it. We're excited to have somebody who knows all about open source. Our next guest is Jeff McCaffer. He's the director of open source progress officer at Microsoft. Did I get that right, Jeff? No, well, it's the open source programs office. Programs officer, so you're all about open source. So first off, welcome. Thank you very much, Jeff. Good to be here. So Microsoft, no one would have ever thought, I mean, I'm predating myself 15 years ago, that Microsoft would be a big component of open source, but in fact, they're a huge proponent of open source. Absolutely, even just not so long ago. It was not the foremost in everybody's mind that Microsoft would be doing open source, but now it's a core part of our company. It's a core part of how we work and our engagement with the rest of the industry. So it's really growing and it's continuing to grow. So how did it kind of get there? And what are some of the real key components that you have to worry about in your role of managing, participating in all these various communities all over the place? Yeah, well, I mean, it's been a long road, but it's really the way software is happening today. You mentioned in the intro about the speed of software versus hardware and software just going so fast. And you can aspire to be world-class, but when everybody else starts there with open source, it's really hard to start from zero and get to there. So we're really happy to be using open source and contributing. One of the real challenges we've had going forward is the scale. Simply we've got literally millions of uses of open source across all of our products and services and managing that, keeping track of it, engaging with all those communities and everything is a real big challenge. So we've been building policies and tools and changing the culture to understand that you need to engage, push fixes back, all those sorts of things. And then when we look at our releasing our software, we have thousands of open source repositories on GitHub, thousands of developers at Microsoft working on GitHub repositories our own and others in the community. So it's just managing all of that as being a really big challenge. Right, and it's interesting because the open source projects themselves, you've seen it time and time again, they fork and they go a lot different directions. There's sometimes disagreement about direction and prioritization. So you've got to kind of manage that within the open source thread, but as well as within where those products play a role in your products. Right, right. And we've taken a sort of federated model in the company, we're very diverse as you know. And so my team sort of helps put guidelines in place for project teams to run. And then those project teams run their own program, how they engage with open source, however they want to, and sort of at the level they want to that matches their business requirements. So it ranges everywhere from people who are fully open source to folks who are just using a little bit of stuff here and there within their products. Right, I wonder if you could speak a little to open source and the role that it plays in employee happiness, employee retention. Because there's so much goodness and you see it at these shows where there's particular contributors that they're rock stars in their community. They've made super important contributions, they've managed the community. And I always think back, if you're the person managing that person back at the office, how much time do they put into their open source efforts? How much time do they put in their company efforts? How much other time is really the company software that's built on top of that open source? And how do you manage that? Because it is a really important piece for a lot of people's personas and their self-value. Yeah, well, and there's been a lot of research that says also that high performing teams, one of the traits of high performing teams is engaging in open source. And at the personal level of individuals, there's kind of a different set of possibilities there. Either you're engaging in open source for part of your product work, right? So that's sponsored by the company. Or you might be doing some things on the side or some tangential range in between there, right? And sort of all of those, you need to drive to the appropriate level. The folks who are working on it day to day for the company, there's some really interesting dynamics that can get set up, super exciting for the team. Sometimes they can get a little waylaid maybe, but you want to keep them on task. But then also the folks who are doing it of their own volition, like on their own time and that sort of thing, that also brings back a bunch of energy and everything into the workplace. New technologies that they'll discover in their area and they'll bring back the energy and the excitement about engaging back to the regular team. So there's lots of possibilities there. So what brings you here? What brings you at AT&T Spark today? Well, they invited me to speak on a panel earlier today about open source and the future of open source. And so I had, there were a couple of other people from Linux Foundation and from AT&T. So we had a good conversation on stage. Yeah, it's pretty interesting how pretty much all these projects eventually get put into the Linux Foundation that they've just kind of become this de facto steward for a wide variety of open source projects. Yeah, there's a number of different foundations. Linux Foundation is certainly one of the better known ones. The Eclipse Foundation, Apache, been around lots of times doing lots of good things. So there's a ton of amazing projects out there in all of these foundations. And it's just super exciting to see them all be engaging like in this sort of cohesive way, right? And with a good governance model. So give you the last word. One of my favorite lines always is open source. Is open source just free like a puppy? Yes, it's totally free like a puppy. You know, you live it in that world. You know, what is one of the things about open source that most people miss? One of the really positive attributes that most people just don't see. And what's one of the, you know, your kind of biggest kind of ongoing challenges that's just part of operating in this open source world? Well, I mean, I phrase it in challenges and opportunities, right? There are obviously lots of challenges like I was saying with scale and managing security and the culture change that goes around collaboration and that sort of thing. The opportunities I think are boundless really. I mean, there's one of the most gratifying things that you can see as an open source project is people take your technology and use it in ways you never imagined, right? So we can think of that as our products too and we take our products and they've got open source APIs, they've got open source frameworks and such and people take them and do amazing things with them that we never imagined possible. And that part is really exciting and invigorating. All right, Jeff. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. Congrats on all your work and I guess we'll see you in Orlando in a month or so. Okay, possibly. All right, he's Jeff. I'm Jeff, all Jeff's here. We're at the Palace Fine Arts at AT&T Spark. Thanks for watching. See you next time.