 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live in LA for the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman, my co-host, our next guest, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Runs the whole show. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you. Thank you, thank you. Runs the whole show is a little bit of an overstatement. Well, certainly great keynote up there. I mean, a lot of things coming together, just some structural things. Let's get the update on what's going on structurally with the Linux Foundation. Sure. One, and then two, the keynote today this morning, really kind of laid out the state of the union, if you will. And all cylinders are pumping, no doubt, on Open Source. So give the quick update on kind of what's going on at the Linux Foundation, and then let's get at some of the trends inside the Open Source community. Yeah, I mean, our organization has grown quite a bit in the last few years, is evident by all the people who are here at this event. But our focus is really on the projects that are important to the stability, security, and growth of the global internet, and of large scale systems. And when you look at Linux, or Node.js, or things like our networking projects, which are powering the production networks for three and a half billion people, we're really focused on is making sure those projects are healthy, making sure that they have great developers who write incredible code, that it's used to power things like China Mobile's network, or AT&T's production network. And then those firms are employing the developers, who then write more code, you get more solutions, products, services based on Linux, or whatever, more reinvestment, lathering, it's that cycle we're trying to promote. So, before we get into some of the stats, structurally, I know this show, we've, CubeCon was out there, clarify the structure, how the shows are rolling out, how are you guys putting together the big tent events, and how developers can get involved in specific events across. And now there's a ton of projects, but just at a high level, what's structured? Yeah, so, you know, and I'll throw out a few stats. We have about 25,000 developers that attend all of our events, which are all over the world. But we have our open source summit, which is really sort of a summit to come together and talk about these big picture issues around sustainability, to allow for cross project sort of collaboration. We have project specific events, so the CloudNativeCon, CubeCon event, which is coming up in Austin, which is going to be blowout. You know, I mean, I'm expecting thousands of people. I didn't even probably have three or four thousand. I'm getting more platinum sponsors than I've ever seen in any project before, so it's crazy. Demand. Yeah, yeah, you know, you get it while it's good, right? It is, you know, all these things kind of go up and down, but they're on the upswing. So we have project specific, and then in the networking sector, we have the open networking summit, which is sort of similar to open, the open source summit, but much more focused on networking technology, SDN and NFV. And that is going to be an LA next year, and we'll have a U.S. event, and then a European and a Native. This shows purposes, what is this? How would you position the open source summit? The open source summit is where all the projects come together and do cross, you know, pollination. You know, I mean, the idea here is that if you're just always in your silo, you know, you can't actually appreciate what someone else is doing that may improve your project. And Jim, there's a couple of events that came together to make this, because it was LinuxCon, ContainerCon, and Meso'sCon is also co-residents. Exactly, so we just decided after a while that, you know, all these events could come together. And again, you know, this cross-pollination of ideas. And they kind of did, they're just different hotels in Seattle last night. Right, exactly. It's like, all right, that's enough. We can't call it, it's just going to be open source. It's a big tent event. It's a big tent event, and it really reflects how open source has gone mainstream in a way that I don't think any of us would have predicted even maybe five, six years ago. It's pretty massive, just to quote some stats, 23 million plus open source develops. What do you share on stage today? I want to get to your keynote. 41 billion lines of code, 1,000 plus new projects a day, 10,000 versions, new versions pushed per day, 64 million repos on GitHub, just amazing growth. And so this kind of points to obviously the rising tide is floating all both. Now I made a comment, I tweeted, I got in the spirit of the joke of standing on the shoulders of giants before you. It's like, what shoulders are we standing on now? Because there's so many projects. Right here, right here. It's going to be like a legacy, like the dual star, batch values. Then around for a while, you mentioned old news and you bring up Linus on stage. I mean, some projects are older, more mature, groove swing, tier one, meat and potatoes, some got a little bit more flair and fashion to it, if you will. So you got new dynamics going on. Yeah, I mean it's like the shoulders you're standing on are almost like stage diving, right? Where it's just lots of people, shoulders that you re-basket around on. But the idea here, and what we really focus on is what are the most important projects in the world and how do we make sure we sustain those projects? So those are the ones that you're going to generally see focused on here. Like, you know, if you've got two people contributing to one small repo for a very small project, that's probably not something that's going to be super high profile here. But what we're trying to do is bring together sort of the big projects and also the key contributors. You know, if you look at the distribution and this is the thing I think if you're a developer listening to something like this, someone who gives, you know, just one commit to a project to solve some kind of problem they might have, you know, that's the vast majority of people. Somebody who does maybe five to 10 commits, you know, a little bit less, quite a bit less, the vast majority of code, people who give 25 or more commits to a project, small group of folks. They're here. I know Stu wants this question, one final question on the growth, because this kind of reminds me of, you know, sports as we like the ESPN of tech here for the community. If you look at the growth, you put a slide by Source Clear that showed the projection by 2026 at 400 million libraries, at putting it today around I think 64 million. This is going to be like an owner's meeting. It's kind of like they get together this event because you are going to have so many projects. Because this is kind of the vibe you got going on here. The scale is massive. This is going to be almost like the owner's meeting. The teams, expansion is going to be coming. You have to deal with that. That's challenging. We're ready to grow. I mean, we've been working on systems and staffing and processes to help scale with that. You know, we take seriously that that code runs, you know, modern society, it keeps us private or doesn't, as we saw with the Equifax pack, which was a CVE in an open source project. And we want to be ready to up our game to, you know, let's say we could have a secure coding class at this very event for the greatest developers who are working on the most important projects in the world. Would that make all of our lives better? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, you want to enable that. That's where you're going. That's exactly where we're going. Yeah, Jim, the quote that jumped out at me that you gave in the keynote was projects with sustainable ecosystems are the ones that matter. Yeah. How do we balance all this? I heard in Linus's Q&A, it was, you know, look, individuals important, but companies are important. You put up a slide and said, you know, there's, you know, thousands and thousands of projects. Sometimes we're going to get some really awesome stuff from three people, you know, contributing code versus, you know, the massive ecosystem with all the platinum providers. So, you know, it's always in technology. It's an and, and it's very nuanced, but how do we get our arms around this? How do we know where to focus? You've got to think about, it's almost, it's worth going back in time to understand where the future is going and study innovation theory. You know, Eric Vaughn-Hippel at MIT or Karim Lakhane at Harvard Business School. And you look at the framework, which is, you have corporations who underwrite a lot of development by hiring developers who have an equal importance in this and then users of that software. So those are your main constituents and sometimes they're the same people, right? Or the same things. They're not mutually exclusive. They're actually self-reinforcing if you get the formula right and you make sure that the project is in good shape so that it gives confidence to industry or society that, hey, we can count on that, you know? I mean, I think Heartbleed and OpenSSL maybe rattled people's cages. Like, hey, can we count on, not just this project, but can we count on open source period? So we spent a ton of time working with that project to provide them millions in resources, audited their code, expanded their testing, you know, and we learned a hell of a lot about how to support these communities in the most important developer projects in the world and create that positive feedback loop and that's what we're doing. Yeah, and Jim, as an analyst, one of the things we're always asked is, right, how do I choose the right technology? Where, as you know, companies now we're contributing here, so it's not just I'm putting dollars in, I'm putting manpower into this and the foundations sometimes get a lot of lumps from people saying it's like, oh well, people throw money and what do they get out of it? I really, I liked what I heard today, you're talking about the cycle and maybe talk to our audience a little bit about chaos. Which I thought was a nice tongue and cheek acronym to say how you're actually going to bring order to the chaos that we see in the open source world. I think people need to, I'm going to come to chaos but I want to answer one quick question about the roles of organizations like ours. We are the roadies, the supporting cast, and the plumbers and the janitors of the system that keep things going and, but the real rock stars are the developers and they're underwritten by, if you think about it, Linux is worth $10 billion. An average kernel developer makes probably, let's say 150,000 a year, by the way, they make more than your average developer because they're in such high demand. The role of organizations like ours is such a tiny fraction financially of what is really fueling this model but it's an important one. And what we ask ourselves all the day, all the time is, why do you need us? Who cares, right? Like throw your code up on GitHub, you don't need the Linux foundation, right? Why do we even exist? And the answer is to do things like this community health analytics for open source software to provide the infrastructure for sustainability. Sustainability is something that we need to measure, right? How many developers are contributing to a project? Are they from a diverse community so that if one group goes away, there'll be somebody else there to do that work? How much test coverage do they have? Are there code quality metrics that we can look at? Do they have security practices like a responsible disclosure policy, a security mailing list? Have they recently fuzzed their code? You know, are they a community that's welcoming for people with different backgrounds and so on and so forth? If you don't have a healthy project, you kind of don't want to bet your company on this project by using it in a production system, right? But here's the interesting thing. How many people are using that code in production also is a metric for health, right? Because that's where the reinvestment is going to come in the form of developers who are working on it. There's a difference between being proactive and being jamming something down someone's throat. So you're taking an approach if I get this right to be kind of the same open source ethos, use some KPIs, key course indicators to give them a sense of success. But you're not an edict saying you can't be an edict. It can't be an edict. What you want to do is preserve the organic innovation that goes on in open source and get projects to go, and you'll notice that curve of like sort of value to volume goes up and to the left. We could have written it to the right, but we hold the whole copy left thing we love. So it goes up and look, how do you get that organic innovation to kind of go from this small project up and to the left, right? How do you capture that? Well, give tools to everyone so that they can better self-analyze. You get exponential growth with that. Exactly, that's the key. If you try to control, it's linear. Exactly. You bring it to the community, you get exponential growth. Exactly, so we studied a ton of innovation theory. We looked at how we can build frameworks to facilitate this kind of form of mass innovation, and so that's where tools like Chaos, which is being worked on by Red Hat and a lot of companies who want to figure out which project should I work on, how can I spot that one earlier, and we're excited about it. You know, I always joke being the old guy that I am and the late 80s, early 90s, and the 80s particularly when I was coding, we did everything, we wrote all the code. You bring up an interesting stat and you put the same finger on it, at least for me, and I think this is where a lot of us old timers who had to do all the libraries from scratch, you mentioned the code sandwich, the code club, the club sandwich, how code's being made, and the interesting thing is you find 90% of most great software is done with open source where the 10% innovation is done with original code or original content, if you will, and that is the norm. So open source is now called the code sandwich because you can put your differentiation, that's a good use of time. That's the meat. That's the meat, it's not a wish sandwich, as to use the old Blues Brothers example, but I mean, look, the thing is that that's dynamic is real, the code is leverageable, and that this is the dynamic, so is that 90%, where did the number come from? So that seems really high to me, but I love it. It's great. No, no, no, so that number came from a combination of Sonatype, Sourceclear, and other organizations that monitor commercial reuse of software on a global basis, so these are the folks who are actually working with commercial industry to look at the makeup of their code, basically. It also just, you don't have to go far to look at a Node.js developer is, they're using Node.js, they're taking packages out and they're writing, they're cutting pastemasters, but they write this critical component that's the board of their application, it's what they're doing. But that's the innovation fabric that's happening. It also is a requirement because let's look at a modern luxury vehicle today. It has 100 million lines of code in it. That's more than an F-35, like fighter jet, right? That's an unbelievable amount of code. Toyota, we work with, and our AGL, our Automotive Grid Linux is in their Camry. They couldn't write that code on their own, it's just too much. So this is, and this is how we get to autonomous vehicle control and things like that. I know you had a tight schedule, I want to make one more comment, I can do a reaction to it. I made a tweet and said, it's open bar and open source, and with a reference to all the goodness being donated by companies, Google, TensorFlow, there's a lot of other things coming in these libraries. A lot of people are bringing really, really big IP to the table. IoT, and I kind of made it open bar because a lot of the young kids, this is normal, well it's going to get better, it's going to be more, keep on drinking that open source because it's going to be more, it's just normal, it's going to be more like this in the future because you have essentially real intellectual property, like say from Google, being given to the open source communities as a gift for innovation. That is just unprecedented greatness. The reason for that is they're not doing it necessarily altruistically, although I think you can take it that way. They're doing it in a way that betters themselves and others at the same time. I mean, it is a form of collective capitalism where they've realized my values over here, it is better for me to collaborate on underlying infrastructure software that my customers don't care about, that's not critical to my system but I absolutely have to have, and I'm going to focus on data or I'm going to focus on much higher level innovation. And what that's doing is creating this hockey stick of innovation where as we share more and more and more infrastructure software and as that keeps moving up and up the stack, we all benefit. So in the theory of the management, for your management theory, their theory, and I'd love to get your thoughts on is that they're betting on scale rather than trying to go for profits in the short term, they'd much rather share intellectual property on the back end value of scale. And scale is a new competitive advantage. Exactly, take Kubernetes as an example. The fact that today, and just even a couple years ago, this wasn't known. We didn't quite know where this was going to be. But today you can take Node.js, build a container, take an application, throw it into a container and use Kubernetes to run it on Azure, Amazon, Google, or in a private cloud. That definition, the ability to do that unlocks this massive developer productivity which creates more value, which is more business opportunity for all these guys. They're not doing it because they're nice people. They're doing it because they're unlocking market potential. And they're the real rock stars. Jim, you're doing a great job. Congratulations on your success. You got a lot of growth in front of you and a lot of challenges and opportunities, certainly with that. And of course, the tech athletes out there doing the coding, they're the real rock stars. They're the real athletes. Of course, we get more on theCUBE. Thanks for your support with theCUBE as well. Appreciate that. Thank you. All right, this is live coverage from Open Source Summit in North America in Los Angeles, California. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. We back with more live coverage after this short break.