 And, it's great to be here in New Orleans with all of you. This is actually my first trip to New Orleans, you know, and you hear a lot about New Orleans and it's a party city and Bourbon Street and I didn't really know what to expect. And then I got off the plane in the airport and this is the first thing I saw. I don't know, correlation, causation, but so far, you know, it's been a great trip and my liver is still functioning. We'll see how I make it through tonight. So as Jim mentioned, I'm the executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. How many of you have heard of OpenStack? All right, good. That's good because I'm not planning on talking about OpenStack a lot. And we've had a bunch of talks about OpenStack here, but, you know, OpenStack is really a global community, it's in 130 countries around the world at this point. It's one of the fastest growing open source projects out there, the largest centered around cloud and it's been something that's been really exciting to be a part of over the last three years since we kind of kicked it off. But what I want to talk about are some of the trends that we've seen in OpenStack and in other open source projects and really what I think it points to in the world at large and kind of a bigger stage. But you know, looking at this from the software perspective specifically, because as probably all of you believe, you know, software really has gotten to the point where the world runs on software. Whether you're talking about finance, healthcare, government, military, business, anything that you want to talk about, there's software behind it. And I really appreciate Candy's talk. Jim was right, you know, we kind of are coming at similar ideas but from different perspectives. And I think that for me, you know, I started doing software development when I was pretty young and have been doing it for about 17 years now. And I'm just constantly reinvigorated by the potential that I see with what we can do with software. And you know, this is not something that's necessarily a super original opinion. There are a lot of people who think this. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal that Mark Andreessen wrote. He called it, Why Software is Eating the World. And this is a quote from it. And you know, if you just think about even today in the last couple of hours, the ways that you've interacted with software and maybe you didn't realize, you know, whether it was a traffic light, the elevators, your room key, credit card, your phones. You know, I'm sure that while you guys have been sitting here, some of you are sending email instead of listening to me. That's okay. But it's just something that we're constantly interacting with software, sometimes directly, sometimes behind the scenes. And the thing that has been interesting to see over the past few decades I think is really how software is becoming a key part of everything, but how power is really shifting to the people who build the software. You know, if you are a software developer, you probably are aware that there are a lot of software jobs out there. You know, even if you're a bad software developer, you can probably get a job right now. You know, there's just so much demand for development talent. And the thing that's interesting about this is that software developers are not just writing software anymore. They're not just writing code off of a requirements document. They are really driving business decisions. And if you look at new technologies that are rolling out like Linux, the cloud, OpenStack, in many cases organizations are deciding to use these technologies because developers are pushing this. You know, these aren't top level business decisions. These are developers driving the business in this direction because they think that's what is going to be the best technology decision. I know that's how Linux entered the organizations that I was in in the late 90s and early 2000s. And I think that's what we see in a lot of places. And people have observed this phenomenon. Stephen O'Grady wrote a book called The New King Makers. And this was really his point is that the companies who are successful are those who are going to be figuring out how to make that relationship with developers work to their benefit. But at the same time, you've probably also heard this other meme that's going around which is sort of that software development is going to become, you know, the new assembly line job. And there is a lot of outsourcing that happens. How many email administrators are there now per capita versus 15 years ago? Gmail alone has made that something that just a lot of organizations never worry about. And so people like to say that software development is going to become an undifferentiated, almost repetitive, menial task. But I think that it's a really important thing to think about, especially for those of us who are involved in free and open source software and what the role is that we should be playing with organizations and really with the future of all this technology. So I think that what I want to talk about today is why it's happened and the way it's happening. And if we understand that, then we can decide, okay, you know, is this something that's a fad and all of the software developers are going to be out of work and we're going to be like gas lamp lighters and bowling pin setters and these kinds of jobs that have gone away? Or, you know, is this something that opens up a real opportunity for us to have a much bigger impact at the world at large? So I think, you know, if you think back to development and in the history of development, you know, there's a lot of plumbing that developers used to have to do. And you know, there are so many higher level systems that we can work with now that take care of that. But it used to be a very internal job and something that was sort of several layers removed from the edge of an organization from the customers. But you know, now developers really are moving to the edges of organizations. You know, in some cases they are the leaders, although they often don't wear suits and ties now. They still have cool t-shirts. But their work is becoming higher level and more exposed and they're running giant corporations even. And that's something that's changed from the early days of software development. There were a few examples of CEOs and people that were running software organizations in the 70s and 80s, but it's vastly more so that way now. And it's also moved into pop culture. You know, there are plenty of movies and TV shows out there that have cis admins and developers in them. Does anybody know what this is? Jurassic Park. Yes, I heard it over here. There was a scene in Jurassic Park where the dinosaurs are trying to break into this room where the people are hiding and the teenage girl looks over at the master control computer and she looks at this screen here, which has all these boxes flying around and she goes, I know this! It's UNIX! Which I always thought was one of my favorite tech references ever. I'm pretty sure it's not UNIX. But you know, it's something where these jobs and these roles are moving into the mainstream. They're moving out to the edges of the organizations. And one of the big things that's driving all of this is open source. Because what open source has done is it has allowed software developers to organize outside of the standard institutions, governments, big corporations, and really work together across national lines, across corporate lines, and do something that they really care about. And these are some fan art. Our designer decided that our logo should fit in as well. So he put some eyes on it. But this is a movement that started about 30 years ago with free software and open source. And Linux has been doing this for 20 years. And it's created a big change in the way that software has been built. And along with that, it's created this power shift that I see all the time in the businesses that I work with every day in OpenStack. There's a man, Patty Ashton, who has spoken before about the global power shift. And he talks about this from sort of a geopolitical perspective. And he says throughout most of history, power shifted from a government to another government. There were successive empires and power shifted laterally. But now what he is seeing more and more of is that it's shifting outside of those lines. And it's sort of at a different plane. And this was definitely true in the tech industry. Power would shift from one giant corporation to another. And the baton would kind of be passed down the line as new technologies come along. And we see that with operating systems, with databases, with all sorts of technology. But again, what's happening with things like open technologies is that the power is shifting from institution to institution to individuals. And this is really what I think is at the core of why, say, developers are the new superpower. It's not about how giant your company is. It's not about what government you're in. It's about what can you do together as individuals collaboratively. And open source is an early example of this. And I think it's one of the best functioning examples of this. But you can see this in other places in society as well. And Candy gave some great examples where communities are organizing themselves and having that communication directly with each other. And it comes down to the fact that we are just more connected as a global population than ever before. That's fundamentally what is driving this power shift. But when you think about that and you say, OK, we're going to remove some institutions from these processes, then you would think, OK, well, that's just going to lead to chaos. You're going to have a big mess if there's no organization. Since it's outside the rule of government and corporate structure. But what we've seen with projects like Linux that are extremely large scale are that it works. And with OpenStack, we've had seven releases. They've been on time. We've hit them every six months. The base of contributors has grown dramatically with each release. And the interesting thing about it is part of what actually makes it work, the software process, is the software that we have underneath it. And I have a little scenario here. Let's just say that you're a developer and we do code review on every contribution that comes into OpenStack. And let's say that we go back to the 19th century. And how would we do a code review in the 19th century? It's a hypothetical, obviously, because people weren't necessarily writing a lot of code in the 1800s. But let's say that you are in Asia, you're a developer in Asia, and you need to get your code reviewed by a core developer who's in the US somewhere. So you sit down with your ink well and your pen. You write out your change. You package it up, put it on a ship. It heads across the ocean. And then it gets across the ocean, ends up on a train in a big bag of mail, gets a little closer, ends up on a stagecoach. And finally, gets delivered to the core developer who reviews it and rejects it. Total time, months. And so the infrastructure to collaborate really was controlled by institutions throughout most of history. The barriers to entry to collaboration were just too high for individuals to have direct access to it. The way that we do code reviews now in OpenStack is it's all a very automated process. And if you want, you can pull up this URL, review.openstack.org. And in real time, you can see OpenStack changing and growing and getting better right before your eyes. It's really exciting to see. This is a screenshot of the web page there. Each of these is a code submission. And they are from all over the world. They're from all kinds of developers on all sorts of different projects. You click through there. You can see the history, the change sets. You can see comments that people have made, automated test results. And this process happens hundreds of times a day. And so we are at a stage now where individuals have access to the tools to collaborate effectively, no matter where they are and what they're working on. And that is one of the things that really makes this power shift possible. Institutions are also still useful because there are things like paving thousands of miles of road that I'm glad the government does. I like to have nice roads to drive on. But again, back to software. Software is no longer geography dependent. It's not capital dependent to get it started. It's something that really, for many projects, the tools are available for all of us to organize ourselves and accomplish large scale work. And what we can do with that is we can really have an impact on the world. You can look at any problem set out there that we need to deal with, whether it's energy conservation. There's Nest, that's a software problem. Traffic safety, it's a software problem. You can go on and on and list all of the things that you can think of. I saw a job post out here where there's a company that is looking for developers to help them build software to do flight control so that they can go mine asteroids. I mean, that's pretty awesome. And what other trade, what other profession, what other job out there right now gives you such a broad range of opportunity to go out and really impact the world in so many different ways? I can't really think of too many other ones. And so, what does it all mean? I think that there are so many things that are possible and we're at the early stages of this. I think this is gonna continue on for years and decades more. But what does it mean? Well, I think that there are two perspectives here and we can talk a little bit about it from both perspectives, from a business perspective as well as from an individual perspective. Businesses more and more are realizing that their software strategy is what's going to drive their success. And the users that we talk to who are running OpenStack, the reason that they are deploying OpenStack is because they want to make their developers faster and able to work in a more fluid way, push releases out and basically get value to the customer more quickly. But the thing that I think probably a lot of you are familiar with in the open source world is businesses sometimes don't have the right attitude towards open source. I think a really key thing from a business perspective is you have to realize that open source, it's not a marketing initiative, it's not a business model on its own, it's really an innovation philosophy. It's the way that you think about how you're going to produce new technology, new features, how you're gonna innovate. And these companies out there all see that they need to innovate, they need developers to do it and so they have to find ways to attract them now. And I think some of the things that companies need to be thinking about are collaborative business models. In OpenStack we have hundreds of companies that participate in the ecosystem and many times they're competitors. Linux has the same scenario. But these companies come together and collaborate on a core piece of technology that underlies it all. And that's again a little bit of a mind shift from decades and centuries past. Companies also need to understand the motivation for these developers that they want to attract. The developers want to have a bigger impact on the world through software in many cases. And especially with Open Source it's an opportunity to sort of break those chains that lock up technology inside of an institution. And you can have a bigger impact than just that organization or that industry or that circle that you're in. You look at Linux and how many industries it has just shaken up in so many different ways. And another thing that businesses need to understand is that these kinds of environments they create a lot of job mobility and developers have options. We have many developers in the OpenStack ecosystem who have shifted between companies and they're doing the same job the next day. That's power for those developers because they can find a place where they're able to work on what they want to work on, be well compensated, live where they want to live and have a better life for themselves. From an individual perspective I think the thing that we as software developers should keep in mind is just the bigger picture and the bigger opportunity. And that's that we literally have the power to change the world because we have created all of these tools that the world runs on. And so one of the things that I think we should do and I know that this is at an event like this is often preaching to the choir but we should make sure that the valuable innovation that's happening now and that's going to happen over the next few years is never locked up again. If you look through human history it's just full of stories where there have been centuries of technology locked up in monopolies, in governments, in big corporations. And that's been great for the few but as developers we have the power to break that cycle and really make sure that the great innovation that's happening from here on is available for everyone to benefit from and really to have access to it. So that's something that I try to think about, try to make sure that OpenStack is structured in a way and that our community is able to have that kind of an impact. And I think that if we all do that in our little piece of the software world we can really have an impact over the next few years. So that's what I wanted to talk about today and I hope that as we go from this event go back to our projects, what we can really do is take advantage of the tools, the opportunity, the time that we're in to go out and have an impact on the world and through open software and open technology and really go out and use this power that we have for the betterment of humanity. Thank you. Thank you.