 This is, this is great. Again, my name is Ben Golub. I'm going to be joined on stage in a few minutes by Sean Wilkinson, who will give you more background on storage and what it is that we do. The sort of five second version is we're a decentralized version of cloud storage, like a decentralized version of Amazon S3. A slightly more detailed explanation, the one that I'm going to try and give to my parents at Thanksgiving is that we're like Airbnb, but for disk drives. And if that works like most of my Thanksgiving explanations, they'll then ask me to help fix their printer. So, I've spent about the past six months at storage getting deep into decentralized web and blockchain, but most of my career has been in open source. As Jim says, I was CEO of Docker before that, CEO of Gluster. I spent most of my career in open source, and so coming to the open source summit for me is kind of like coming home, except it's coming home to find that your studio apartment has suddenly become Buckingham Palace. It's just unbelievable to see the amount of energy and enthusiasm and growth and economic impact that open source is having. And I hope you all were as excited as I was to see the kind of statistics that Jim was sharing. But prior to getting into tech, I actually spent a few years in international development in places like Kenya and Uzbekistan. And I'm now at a stage in my life where, I don't know, I'm trying to recursively justify my existence by saying like, what is it that these three things have in common? And what they have in common is that the end goal is sustainability. The end goal is saying how can we make these things continue to grow and continue to expand. And the interesting thing is in all three fields, the answer seems to be pretty clear. The answer is consistent. It's embracing concepts of openness. It's embracing concepts of decentralization and not keeping things too contained. And importantly, driving for individual and economic empowerment. So I'm going to be up here talking about open source, both its opportunities and challenges from my perspective. Sean's going to do the same thing for decentralization. But what we're going to really try and do is say, hey, given that we share these common values, what is it that we can do together? Sort of to take a phrase from Jim, how can we drive the gears of economic development? What can we do between open source and decentralization to make each other more successful? And I think there's a very interesting answer. Check on two. Okay. That is the answer. Check on two, and then you'll find. I think what you'll find, though, is that we now have a really amazing new opportunity for individual open source projects to control their own destiny and derive revenue from the centralized web. So I'll get into that in a bit. But to make these sort of these concepts of openness and individual empowerment a bit more concrete, I'd like to start with an example from my days in international development. So I started out my career in rural Kenya, interviewing people on demographic issues, and I remember one conversation I had where I was speaking to a subsistence farmer saying, hey, what could we, the international community, do to make your life better? Help build a hospital or give you money to rebuild your roof or a school for your kids. And the answer that I got, which I thought was both simple and really profound, was none of the above. Give me a loan to buy my own tractor. And the farmer went on to say, if I did that, then I'd control my own destiny. And if I had a tractor, then I could build my own roof and my kids wouldn't have to work on the farm. I could send them to school. And that notion that the way you get great outcomes is by individually, economically empowering people is profound. And it turns out not only true at a local level, but the past 50 years of economic development have kind of proven that this is true. So we're going to be spending a lot of time on tech today, but take a bit of time to think about the rest of the world. It actually turns out that the rest of the world has been making some amazing strides in the past 60 years. In 1960, half of the planet lived in extreme poverty. That's down to under 10% now. You look at other things like infant mortality and life expectancy, amazing progress. Four times as many people now live in a democracy. Huge increases in literacy. Now, we can go a lot farther, and this isn't true in every country. But the fact that it isn't true in every country means that there's 197 experiments out there to show what works and what doesn't work. And the farmer was right. It really comes down to individual economic empowerment. So charity is great, but it doesn't go far enough. Having one centralized sector like oil that's dominated by one or two players, it's an anti-pattern. But what really works is in countries and programs where they've managed to take sharecroppers and give them the ability to become independent farmers or take people who work in sweatshops and give them the ability to buy their own sewing machine. That makes a huge difference. You might recall that on the previous slide, the huge increases in the number of girls who are completing primary schools. It turns out that the single biggest predictor of whether a girl completes primary school is whether her mother has an independent means of generating income. Individual economic empowerment achieves great things. So why did I spend all this time on international development? Because I think if we look at the open source world, the same patterns will help both explain the tremendous successes and the opportunities we have for improvement. Now, open source, we're crushing being open. We're absolutely crushing and showing the power of being open for security and better code. And I think probably everybody in this room can appreciate how profoundly powerful and empowering that individual pull request can be. And the results kind of speak for themselves. I stole Jim's slide from last year. This is sort of in the true open source sense. And look at that, 23 million open source developers. Amazing acceleration. We're also the major driver of innovation in machine learning and AI. And as Jim said, 90% of all cloud workloads are on Linux. And beyond the operating system, well over two thirds of all workloads are open source. So in a very real sense, you built the cloud. Give yourselves a round of applause. Open source, we built the cloud. And now speaking as somebody who's been an open source CEO, it's also really exciting to see that we're starting to create real business successes. So 10 years ago, there was Red Hat and nobody else could point to another successful open source business. Now there are over five companies that have gone public and there are a lot of others that are on the way. That's great news. But the bad news, I think there's still a huge disconnect between the bottom third of this slide and the top two thirds. If you think of the amount of value that open source is creating and the amount of pure play business success, there's a disconnect. 24 million OSS developers. 17,000 work at those five public open source companies. The Red Hat, Mongo, Hadoop, sorry, Mongo, Hortonworks, Cladera, and MuleSoft. $180 billion cloud market. According to Gartner, going to grow probably another 20% this year. Five billion total revenue with those public OSS companies. So while we're doing a great job of being sustainable in code development, I think we've got a long way to go in terms of the economic development model. And this is not to castigate anybody. Obviously you've heard how generous people like Google are being in terms of supporting and generating new code and driving growth in open source. But how much better could we be if the open source projects and companies that are driving the cloud could actually directly benefit from that to drive further innovation. So there was a direct market-based mechanism for driving growth and innovation. Ten years ago when I started as CEO of Gluster and I spoke to other open source CEOs, we all had a pretty similar idea for how we were going to grow. We were going to start out building a great community and project. Then we were going to try and monetize it through an XS service. And then after we were sustainable, go after the large enterprise. And as far as that XS service, some of us were going to do Paz, some of us were going to do iAs, some of us were going to do SAS. Some of us couldn't tell our ads from our elbow, but we knew that if we did this right, we'd get sustainable. We'd go after the small business and we'd do things that small tech companies are good at, like building code, as opposed to things that larger companies are good at, like hiring large sales forces. And unfortunately, the discount nudity is showing up there, too. More often than not, successful infrastructure projects. If you're a successful infrastructure project, you'll find that there's a cloud company offering a free version of your software as a loss later. And the same challenge as you move from... And so that middle path is not there. And so you have to try and do difficult things. Almost all of these successful open source companies that I mentioned before, they've gone directly to the largest scale enterprise, and most of them have had to raise over $200 million in order to get there. So that's a challenge for having a continual pipeline of new companies. And you see that I underlined this term loss leader. I think it's a real challenge that the biggest and most successful monetization model now in open source is not dual licensing or service and support or even open core. It's the use of open source as a loss leader for infrastructure. Because I think that creates an existential question for us as an industry. If loss leader is the dominant model, loss leader for infrastructure is a dominant model, and we know that there are maybe five companies in the world that can be successful public cloud companies, that's going to be a problem. How are we going to drive economic growth and innovation? And foundations are amazing. Linux Foundation and Cloud Native is amazing, but they're not enough. The large cloud and commercial infrastructure companies, it's fantastic that they're embracing open source the way they are, but we don't want to be in a world, I think, where there are only 10 companies making money off of open source. And so again, I ask, can we drive direct, meaningful, broad economic growth in open source from the cloud? The answer is yes, but it's going to take a new type of cloud and one that's built in a decentralized way, which has fundamentally different economics, but also fundamentally new opportunities for open source. So to explain a little bit more about decentralized infrastructure, I'd like to ask Sean Wilkinson to come on stage. Again, he's the founder of Storage and all-around great guy. So Sean. Thanks, Ben. So my journey into decentralization starts in 2014. I was building various software projects and they needed to store a lot of data. And so I was looking at the various options that I had available to me, and they're really expensive or they really didn't have the feature sets that I wanted, and these were closed source platforms and tools. And so I wasn't really quite happy with the options. And around this time, I was playing around with some kind of Bitcoin and blockchain. I was mining some Bitcoin in my dorm room. And I found the concept quite fascinating, the idea that I could rent out my extra processing cycles on my computer to this magical Bitcoin network and then get paid from that. And something in my head kind of clicked to say, hey, maybe these things go together. What if I could build a decentralized and distributed network where I could store my data on people's computers and then they could get paid and rewarded for that task. And so I kind of went down the rabbit hole of how to build this kind of decentralized, distributed application and I never came out of that rabbit hole. So we'll talk a little bit more about that later. So let's talk about decentralized applications. And let's define them a little bit. So a decentralized application is a way to create a service that no single entity controls. Now, why would we do this? Well, when you don't have a single person or entity control it, you get a little bit better privacy, right? You don't have a single person that can go kind of snooping and looking through that data. You end up getting a lot better security. Again, you're not reliant on a single person's or entity's security model. And it ends up being a lot more trustless and you don't have to rely again on that single person who, for some reason, might not like you and wants to ban you from their platform. And it's a lot more automated. For this to even work with multiple entities, there needs to be a lot more automation and coordination in the system. And so these are things that we generally like in applications. Now, let's clear one thing up. When you hear about decentralization, decentralized applications, you might have heard this associated with cryptocurrencies or blockchains. So I'm just curious, by a show of hands, who has Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dogecoin or any other cryptocurrencies? Okay, so if this was the SAT, I'd say that decentralization is to cryptocurrencies as the internet is to cat pictures and videos, right? Great, niche, interesting, impactful use case, but the concept is much more useful to us as users. So diving into decentralized applications a little bit more, the majority of the applications that we use today are centralized applications, right? They're controlled by a single company or person or entity, and they have single points of failure. So if someone happens to run, I don't know why they would do this, RMRF Star on a centralized application, well, it's gone, right? And this is in sharp contrast to a decentralized application which, again, has no central authority person running it, no single point of failure. So if you run that same command in a decentralized application, there might be some impact, but it's not catastrophic. And decentralized applications try to take this a little further. They're open source and to enable this coordination and enable this decentralized application to work, they have to be led by math and algorithms and code rather than, again, trusting a singular group of people or entity. So if some of these things sound familiar, they should. Open source and decentralization are tied. Decentralization is almost an extension of open source where it tries to take, you know, be transparent and open and take that a little further by trying to make things more algorithmic and more baked into the code wherever you can see what's going on under the hood in real time. And again, this is what you need to enable that coordination of many different actors in this ecosystem. And it's, again, a very sharp contrast to more proprietary and close source systems which are the complete opposite of a decentralized system and open source. So the question that we set out to solve was can we build the world's largest, most performant, economical and secure cloud storage network without building or operating a single data center? Now, why would we do this? Well, if you look at the graph on the right, this is a mapping of the internet in 2004. And what do you notice about this? Well, it's a decentralized network. There's no one giant blob in the middle that controls the entire internet. And so when you build your applications, it's like how we access them and use them as if by magic you start to solve some of the fundamental problems that we're dealing with today. So for example, better security. Instead of putting all this application data in a nice manicured data center and hoping there's no breaches or hacks, you have to take a fundamentally different, more open and more security model. So in our network, we take data and files. We encrypt them, client-side. We break them into small pieces and distribute them over the network. And so if you think of this security model, it's almost like taking encrypted bits of sand and then spreading them over an encrypted beach and saying, you know, good luck trying to access its data. You're probably not going to be able to find it. It ends up being a lot more performant. Being able to access data that might be stored in your neighbor's house next door is going to be a lot more performant than probably accessing that data in a data center and thousands of miles away in rural Kansas. It ends up being a lot more available. In our network, you have 40 different pieces. The file is broken up into 40 different pieces all on individual internet connections and power supplies and computers. So the failure of any one doesn't have that much of an impact versus if your data center goes down, you know, there goes your data. And much more better economics because in this network, you're not paying for the fire suppression systems of the data center or the HVAC or repaving the parking lot. You're just paying for the cloud storage. And so it just ends up being a much better bottle for building applications. And while we're doing this for cloud storage, there's many, many other people around the world that are building decentralized applications in compute and databases and content distribution that have some really awesome, interesting properties. So how have we done? One year in since our launch, we've had over 150,000 farmers, farmers or people who are on our network that are able to run out their extra hard drive space and get paid for participating and building this network. And we've stored over 150 petabytes of data. And how did we do this? Well, we didn't do it by using the traditional model of building out a $600 million data center in some role-placed with great electricity. We did it by being an open project, an open source project, a decentralized project that allows individuals and parts of our communities to contribute their access resources and get paid for them. And so it's a lot more economically empowering for our users and our community, which is, again, in very sharp contrast to traditional applications and traditional centralized clouds where the cloud company is providing a majority of the resources and getting a majority of the economic benefits. So it's like Ben was talking about a lot more empowering to our users and community who participate in this network. So I believe we're in the midst of a major transformation. In 1983, Scott McNally said, the network is the computer. And that model looked more like this. Very impactful, but a lot of room for improvement. And so I believe that the network is the marketplace. And as we want these things such as better privacy and security and performance and cost savings, we'll trend towards more decentralized applications. And there's one thing that decentralized applications and decentralizations that can do that is that centralized applications cannot do. And we believe that is very, very impactful and probably game-changing for open source. So join me in welcoming Ben Gala back on the stage to talk just about that. The network is the marketplace, so I'm going to replace Scott McNally with Sean. One of the cool things about marketplaces, of course, is when you create a new marketplace, you create new dynamics. And as Sean said, one important dynamic with this approach towards building cloud infrastructure is instead of spending millions or billions of dollars in capital, you do it by fairly compensating and incentivizing people who bring supply. Well, the same thing can be true on demand as well. What if we could, instead of spending millions of dollars on salespeople and marketing, actually compensate the people who bring growth and demand to the market? And we know that open source is driving the public cloud, so why not come up with a plan that says, hey, can we directly compensate open source companies and projects for bringing demand to the cloud? And so that's what we're doing. Storage announced a program today, and we hope that others will join us in this. But basically, if you're an OSS project that generates storage, if you're a couch base or an influx or a Mongo, and people use you and create snapshots or backups, create a connector that takes about a day that enables people to store on this network. Our network will programmatically built into our code so you can inspect it, track usage, and return a meaningful percentage of revenue to you and your project. And we think this is very powerful. We're very excited that when we shared this idea with a few friends, the folks that you see up here like Confluent and Mongo and Maria and Influx and Minio jumped on the bandwagon. And we're excited about that for us. I mean, we're a network operator. We make money. The larger our network grows. We're excited for our farmers. But we also are excited to see if this model can catch on with the rest of the decentralized infrastructure community. Because if we do this right, we're going to create another one of those virtuous circles that Jim was talking about earlier. Have OSS drive innovation so OSS generates demand for the network. The network benefits from that increased demand, network operator benefits, the farmer's benefit, and the people who drive demand to benefit as well. And if we can drive meaningful revenue based off of usage back into open source, then we can drive more innovation, more demand, more growth, and keep the cycle going. Because as exciting as this open source summit is on the 25th anniversary of Linux's birth, I can only imagine how exciting it will be in five years if we can get this engine going. Thank you all.