 Hi, this is Hossak Nibharkya and today we have with us once again Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat. Matthew, it's great to have you on the show. It's good to be here. Yeah, and today we're going to talk about... Excited for this. Yeah, and today we're going to talk about the role of open source communities in innovation. I mean, this is a topic you and I kind of know as well as back over hand, but sometimes the messaging needs to be repeated. You have been this in the space for a very, very long time. And today we live in a world which is kind of more or less driven by open source. So, talk about what have you seen that the successful companies, successful technologies, successful solutions that are there, how has open source enabled that? What role has open source played in the history? Yeah, it's been a wild ride, right? From a kind of niche, techy kind of thing to, yeah, like you said, being everywhere in the world. And I think, I mean, the way it's enabled it simply is that sharing is more powerful than hoarding. That's basically what it comes down to. And people working together on things can build bigger things and that enables other people to build on top of that. And once you get to a certain level of that amount of sharing, it's unstoppable. And that's where we are. Since you are someone who have seen both of many aspects of open source working outside of a company, contributing to the project, and then as the Fedora leader, getting a sponsor or the payroll of a company, can you talk a bit about when we look at open source, there is no open source community, there are open source communities. Even within Red Hat or Fedora, CentOS, Stream, you have communities. So can you talk about the behind the scenes working of open source so that folks do understand, hey, it's not a magical place, but Elves and CentOS sit and create open source code base? Yeah, I think that there's something to hit on there that I think is really important about what a community is. And I think it's a word that gets misused a lot. Like we talk about, you know, I don't know, the shoe wearing community or something, whether you just a thing that has an attribute that people have in common. And yeah, there's not really an open source community that is one thing because that's too large to really be a community. A community is a group of people who share a common interest and purpose and are kind of committed to that together because without that commitment, you don't really have a community. You just have a bunch of, you know, you can't really do the things that make community powerful because in order to make decisions, when you have something that's kind of really large and a bunch of disjoint people, sometimes like voting is the way to make decisions. Then you end up with, you know, 60% of people voted for this and 40% of people voted for something else and then 60% wins and then the 40% are, you know, maybe never happy and it doesn't go in the same direction. Whereas if you have a community of people who are trying to get to the same goal that is shared, when you have a hard decision to make, you have to talk to everybody. And the people, even when it is after a decision is made, if things go away that's not the way that you are wanting it to, you can still be on board. You should feel like you're listened to and you can feel like, okay, that's not the way I would have gone, but I understand these people who I'm working with on this also care. They just had a different idea and we're going with their way this time. And, you know, it might be my way next time on some things and that you need that kind of thing for a community. So when you have just a really long, a big term, you don't, you can't have that. So that's, yeah, I like that you called that out. As to how it works, because there's so many different communities, they all work in a very different way and they work at different scales. So, you know, some open source projects are, you know, one person with a great idea and then maybe a little bit of stuff around that or a handful of people who, you know, are working on something, collaborating. Often, you know, not in the same place, but using internet tools, remote work before it was cool. I don't know, it's always been cool, but before it was everywhere, right? Using these collaborative tools to talk and share back and forth on things. And, you know, it's, it can be like any kind of hobby where you put a lot of things into it and it's where you get back, you know, same kind of thing as like a, you know, D&D group or a railroad, model railroad club or photography club or whatever kind of things where you work together on this thing that's your shared project. Can you also address some of the misconceptions that you have seen, comments, misconceptions that you've seen people have about open source? What are those? Yeah, so one of the biggest things is that open source is for coders that, you know, it's about source code. So obviously you got to be a programmer to really care about this. And although obviously like it's a great place, if it's a great thing to work on, if you are a coder or programmer, if you're interested in learning about that or whatever, that's awesome. But it's really something where we need any project, but especially one on a large scale like Fedora. But even smaller projects need so many people who are not coders to do the parts of making the project work that are essential. Like, you know, some, you know, maybe other technical things that are like doc writing or bug triage and things like that are, you know, technical documentation are important. But there's also, you know, storytelling and, you know, graphic design and the kind of things like program management, helping things stay on a schedule, running meetings, being able to be organized. Like a lot of software developers are not very good at those things. And so having people who bring those skills to the project is just so huge. And a lot of times, you know, we rely on people who are software developers, but also have some other interests to bring those skills, where I think it would be really nice if we could have people who maybe have a little interest in the project, but don't need to also be coders so they can really bring, you know, what, you know, their creativity or organization or passion or, you know, whatever it is into the project and, you know, help us build something bigger and better that way with those kind of skills. And I think, yeah, the one, when I say everybody should get involved in open source, people sometimes hear that as a everybody should learn to code thing. And that's not, that's not what I mean. If I asked you in today's modern world, what role do you think Fedora is playing in modern computing? Of course, we do know that Linus uses Fedora. I hope it says you're still using it. But, you know, so I want to hear from you. Of course you are a bit biased, but let's see if you can make you a bit unbiased and hear from you. Yeah. So I think Fedora has a great role where we do really put an emphasis on this community thing I've been talking about. We want to make a community build operating system that is designed by the community and serves, you know, both our upstream projects. That's the things, the software we integrate, like GNOME and KDE for desktop environments and the other smaller ones. And, you know, also the compilers and the language tools, Rust and C and, you know, Python and all of those things are upstreams that come together. We make an operating system using those things and applications, all of that stuff. We want to be a good conduit for those people to bring the people working on that and those projects to bring their software to users in a nice integrated way. And then we also want to serve our downstream projects that, you know, build on this. So that would, you know, obviously the reason for the funding that we get from Redhead is because of Redhead Enterprise Linux, which is based on Fedora Linux, built every, you know, three years out of Fedora Linux into that. And then now Amazon is switching their Amazon Linux to also be Fedora based, because they see that our community process works and that Redhead didn't want to go out and try and invent their own thing. They see this that is working and kind of something that they can build, you know, build on there. So I think Fedora, we'd like to be a place where you can kind of use it to build things that solve your own problems, whether you're a gigantic company or if you, you know, someone has a little version of it that they've made that they tailored to that they, you know, feels the best for gamers. So there's a downstream, a much smaller downstream Fedora Linux that is gaming tailored. And that's that kind of thing. Like that's that's a nice place to be in because, you know, we do have this big community that cares and we are building all of these different things. And you don't have to kind of reinvent the wheel. If you have some ideas of how to do that or how to, you know, make a product out of it or whatever it is. So kind of sitting in that in that spot where we are doing this integration on a pretty fast cycle and then making it available to people. I think that's the Fedora technical spot. And also a lot of the ways our community spot as well, where we have people who, you know, are both in those downstreams, you know, Red Hat and Amazon engineers working on it and people in the upstreams from those different software communities there and then users and people with their own needs. It's a place where we can all come together and be friends and work on this cool project together. If you do look at open source, sometimes a lot of folks, you know, they confuse open source with commercialization. The fact is that commercialization is really important for sustainability of open source. If there is no commercialization, then they will companies will not be able to pay folks like you who dedicate their time and life to then they will not even be projects. So can you also talk about the role that you see commercialization play in the health and success of open source? Yeah, I think it is important. I think that's one of the early tenants of the movement. This is not building something that is just, you know, it's not shareware, but it's not like a money extracting thing, but it's okay to sell it. Like that's fine. Commercial thing is an important human activity and it does help drive the growth. But I think the thing that the distinction I like is whether you are building something that is part of this community process, whether you are giving back investing in it and are, you know, really part of building, like I said, you know, a community operating system for everybody, a community software for everybody, or whether it's kind of a means just a commercialization, which is okay. Like I'm not offended by proprietary software. But if you're making software under an open source license, but there's not a community structure around it, there's not a reasonable way to make a fork of it and build on it like that or to do it yourself because everything is so controlled by other means, technical or other legal things, that's okay. It's just not quite part of the same thing. And so I really think that companies, I understand the impulse, but I think there is much more of the innovation and the ability to build something bigger when it is part of this whole shared thing. And I think that especially as, you know, we are moving into a world where software is a lot, software as a service, things are shared. And it's kind of the expertise about running it is kind of more important than the, do you have, you know, how is it licensed and who owns the licensing things, like the company that is going to be the best at running your software in the cloud. It's hopefully, you know, if you're the innovators and creators, you should have a pretty big advantage there and should be able to make, do a pretty good commercialization there while still making everything contribute back. And you don't need to be scared that someone else is going to come along and do it better. I almost, I changed into a Fedora theme shirt before this interview, but I was wearing one from a discourse, not to be confused with discord, discourse, the, you know, open source forum software. And one of the things I like about their, like their pricing page, they're like, either there's a, can I get a discount? Can I get it cheaper or whatever? Or they're basically like, you know, it's open source, go run it yourself. If you think you can do it better and cheaper than we can, no problem. Like there's, it's, there's the option for you. They just put that right up front. Like they're not worried about somebody else doing that better than they are, because they're, they invest so much in it themselves. And I think that's a, that's a commercial model that I really wish I would, more companies could let go of their fear and do that and be successful, I think. Matthew, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this aspect of open source. Most of us who are part of within the community, we do sometimes, you know, sometimes we actually ourselves don't know how things work. So thanks for sharing those as well. And it's also very valuable for folks because open sources can't, can't have become mainstream, but a lot of folks, they still do not know how it works, how they can be part of it. A lot of companies, they are using open source, but they don't know how to become good open source citizens. So thanks for joining us on the sides. And I would love to have you again on the show to, to discuss more aspects of open source. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. I'll, any time I'll do it.