Evolution Of Open Source Software

hey everybody welcome back to the 21st episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams my name is

henry badry and today i talked with jeffrey barek who’s the worldwide program director for open technology

and developer advocacy at ibm jeff has worked in open source for the past 20 years and is currently the head of

ibm’s open source program office needless to say he has seen firsthand

how open source has evolved over the past 20 years and in this episode he covers

the four waves of evolution and also talks about open source business models and how

ibm is monetizing open source software today whether you are a user developer

manager or just curious about the industry open teams is the place to find the information news

training and support you need to thrive with open source software now that the introductions are out of

the way let’s get into it [Music]

jeff thanks so much for joining me on the podcast hey happy to be here henry so you’ve been at ibm for the past 24

years and i’d say you definitely qualify as a true ibm through and through but

before joining ibm you run a startup that was acquired by a t so can you talk a bit about your journey

from this point through to today sure well um again my background’s in

uh engineering and then i went back and got a an mba business degree because i’ve always

sort of like to have that balance of focusing on the technical but also you know what are the practical

ramifications of what you’re what the business is trying to accomplish and i worked for a mobile

operator before coming to ibm back when part smartphones were not nearly anything like that smart they were

actually analog devices the original cellular system was all analog

and so i had a great you know time at that startup and

it did give me a great appreciation though for the difference between you know people that could operate

technology versus people that could build technology right and the company i work for macaw cellular was very innovative

company but most of the other communications companies back then were more

what i would call swiss watch winders not so much swiss watch builders and so

when the former att long distance company acquired the wireless startup i worked for my

standing joke was that you know i didn’t want to work for a large bureaucratic organization so i left went to ibm but it was

actually a great time to join ibm because ibm was then coming out of

another struggle period that they’ve had and ibm’s a company that’s over 100 years old there

aren’t that many companies that you know survive that long so it is a testament that ibm’s been able to

reinvent itself not not just once but several times and lou gerschner was getting things back on

track and uh again i had an appreciation for the fact that ibm was a technology company and that it

really you know was doing some very clever things at the time and without going into a huge amount of

my history uh the short version is that i i’ve worked

for again over 24 years but i really had sort of three different

um focus areas over that period the great thing about a larger company

is that you know you can kind of reinvent yourself and do something different every three to five years and

you know work in a different part of the business and i always also like to say i’ve kind

of been attracted to the pointy end of the spear and you know what the interesting thing

about that is you tend to you end up arriving first but sometimes you run into the immovable object

and certainly trying to do early wireless data at my former employer was pretty

challenging back when the infrastructure was analog but at ibm my first third was

essentially working in the telecommunications industry for ibm engaging

both my former employer as well as the cable properties and cable was emerging as a big

opportunity area as well and i did that successfully for about seven years or so and then i

actually as during that time became part of the att integrated account team you know focused

back on the large long distance company based in you know then the new york new jersey

area but when i pivoted to the second chapter of my career it was really starting to focus more on software

and uh hardware from uh not just engaging with our clients but

you know what how are we going to continue to grow ibm as a company and i took a my first corporate strategy

job doing cross-platform linux strategy so you know what’s the benefit of running linux on the mainframe you know linux on

unix machines and of course linux on x86 where it all started so that was really a great pivot for me

because i i went from not knowing ibm to kind of becoming immersed into ibm

and um the challenge another challenging thing i think about especially in larger business companies is that

it can be so challenging to understand the larger organization that you lose sight of

what’s happening outside and the rest of the ecosystem so i um that’s when i first again got

introduced to open source and learned a bit more about some of the really savvy things ibm did in open

source in the early days most people recall that it was around 2000 when ibm said it was investing a

billion dollars in linux and um you know that was certainly a smart thing that ibm did

back when most people thought linux was sort of a college uh students you know experiment

to try and create a unix type operating system that would run on x86 architecture

but ibm also supported the creation of the apache foundation ibm actually helped

write some of the bylaws and provide a healthy start to what’s now become a great institution

in open source the apache foundation and then lastly ibm helped to found

eclipse the unified software development ide

for initially focused on java and the reason ibm wanted to do that was

that back in that era you had sun and bea

and web logic and other companies trying to create a vibrant market place for

developers and application development around java and the alternative back then was you know microsoft saying hey

you know it’s it’s all from one vendor it all works together it’s all easy and so providing a common

platform to try and unify the java ecosystem was a smart thing and uh but i started to get concerned

about ibm’s activities in the cloud space right because if you go back and look at you know 2010 which

seems like ancient history now but that was when amazon was starting to prove some traction in trying to provide

public cloud as an alternative to customers using their own data center and at that time you know a lot of

people don’t realize it but even you know bomber when he was running microsoft you know realized that

you know public cloud was an opportunity for them as well and the thing that made it easy for them

to get engaged was that neither aws amazon nor microsoft had sort of a

legacy business to keep it occupied and defend or protect right and ibm’s bread and butter was hey we

make hardware so you can buy hardware from us we make enterprise software happy to provide that and we also do all

sorts of services to help you with software and hardware and that kind

of approach you know was a very successful model for ibm for the last 20 years plus since i

joined it but it was really clear to me that when i took a role in cloud and this was again 2012 half the

industry was saying cloud is all about private cloud so cloud in your data center and

the you know amazon and a few others were saying no it’s really going to be more about public cloud

and amazon was you know a early leader but for me in 2014 it was a realization

that no customers are really going to you know customers don’t care about this argument between traditional vendors and amazon

whether it’s private or whether it’s public they were going to decide for themselves

where they would land along that spectrum right and mix and match and both idc and gartner’s data showed

that both public and private were both growing at double-digit you know keggers compound

average growth rates and so the debate didn’t make sense because there would be you could choose both and customers

would want to choose for themselves not be told by vendors what to do and so therefore

i wrote a blog back in 2014 on the value of hybrid cloud and it became the most popular piece

uh in the ibm forbes website that year it got over 17 000 hits which was a pretty big number

for ibm back in that day it’s still a decent number today but success in that cloud space got me

into my current role and what i do today for ibm is i work in open technologies and i also run the

open source program office at ibm and it’s interesting because a lot of

it kind of flies under the radar but you might be surprised to learn that you know we enable you know ibm

currently today has some 350 000 employees worldwide

our group touches about 80 000 of those employees every year because we have open source

annual certification so if you’re working in open source we want you to take this annual review to make sure

that you know you’re dotting your eyes and crossing your t’s we also do these internal webcasts similar to what

we’re doing here where we uh make ibmers aware of open source projects that are happening

in ibm or other things they should be aware of and then we also uh i go

out to the various ibm labs and engage with the people that are working there because

clearly open source was becoming a real force in the industry about six or seven years

ago and it was really important that ibm start to get really engaged and

the critical thing back at that point was that i’d be on a good reputation but ibm just wasn’t as visible you know

we were kind of again flying under the radar but for example if i told you that two years

ago we cleared over 400 000 open source packages as part of a review process to

build open source as part of our offerings that sounds like a great number well

that was 2019 and 2020 we cleared over 512 000

open source packages so we we both consume and contribute back to open

source in a balanced way to try and ensure that

you know ibm is not just uh helping to take advantage of the innovation that’s

happening out in open source but to effectively contribute back to make sure that we’re we want to be

good members of the communities in which we work right definitely and i think ibm was probably one of the first to

be willing to contribute to a lot of these communities because they saw the value in it and that’s kind of the enterprise open source strategy approach

that i think a lot of companies are taking today but it’s been really interesting to hear you’ve you’ve definitely been at the forefront of this evolving

landscape which is open source and so i’m curious to know in the past 20 years

how have you seen open source evolve well it’s really been interesting i i typically look at what i call the four

waves of open source and the first way was all about individuals and whether it was

a software developer or an entrepreneur somebody who

saw the potential of open source a lot of it in the early days was just individuals and a lot of passion

around convictions of what was right you know some people viewed it as almost

like a religious thing of a kind that you know software should be free

and other people had a more pragmatic well you know there’s a role for free software but

you know there’s also a role for companies to find ways to make money off software

right and uh famously bill gates you know back in the 70s wrote this

note to the industry saying paraphrasing you know stop passing around free software or none of us are ever going to

make any you know living in this industry right but you know sharing software has been happening

as long as there have been computers and the second wave of open source was when

companies like ibm took notice and i mentioned back in 2000 we supported linux

but it wasn’t just ibm there were other companies like hp and others that saw the value

of the potential and you could almost think of early open source was sort of like doing fundamental research in university

right it’s like you know you don’t want to just do your own research you want to publish papers and share your knowledge and build the

common knowledge base of the area that you’re you know working in and so you know that era lasted for

about another you know seven or eight plus years and then suddenly this third wave of impacts started to

happen essentially the emergence of hyperscale players so some people call them fang but it’s

like you know facebook amazon apple netflix google all of these but there are more twitters

another example ebay is another early example all of these companies

started to build their platforms with conventional enterprise software but the real opportunity to be a game

changer was to leverage open source software to build a massive platform affordably the interesting

thing is all of those hyperscalers used open source to grow but they all had different approaches to

whether they would contribute back or not you know apple was an example of somebody who was very reluctant to contribute back early

on it just wasn’t in steve’s jobs culture to be a sharing caring kind of guy right it’s like

sure basically you want to give me free software i’ll take it but expect something for me you know forget that again i

mentioned ibm ibm was was the senior leadership back then was very savvy about open source

and realized that you know if ibm just showed up in these young open source communities and said

hey we’re the 800 pound gorilla you know and here’s how it’s going to work all those people would walk away

and you know that’s one of the great things about open source right is that individuals have freedom of action just

like you know companies do and so that’s a reason that ibm always has tried to be a

a balanced consumer and contributor but after the hyperscaler phase we’re into

this now fourth wave of impact and that’s that traditional enterprise companies companies like

ibm’s customers are starting to change the way they consume open source software

they’re still going to have these subscription support relationships uh with red you know red hat or

suse or canonical or ubuntu you know all the other recent startups

because you know that’s one of the key things that some people don’t really understand about

open source in the enterprise is that say your db and you put this open source

database out there and you’re getting all of these folks you know downloading copies of it and you’re going great

how do i you know how do i tell of all these thousands of people that are using it who can i actually sell something to and

you know some people would say oh it’s the big companies you can sell to big companies and or oh it’s the financial sector you

should sell to the financial sector but those are both wrong answers the the people that will actually give you money

are the people that are using your technology to build mission critical apps because if you have a mission critical

app that incorporates open source software you want someone to pick up the phone when things go wrong that has

influenced the direction that enterprises are taking so they will still have that

relationship but now they’re seeing the value of putting some of their own software developers

directly into open source projects that they feel are significant

to them and a great example of that in the u.s marketplace is a financial

company called capital one they started innovating over 10 years ago they they decided that they needed to

sort of have you know a research group you know why would a bank need a research group but they knew that you know technology had

potential they actually started their own open source program office five or six years ago and they’re now

also they’ve joined the cloud native computing foundation as part of the end user community and

they have some of their people participating again not everywhere because you know resources are not limited but

selectively they’re just one example of what i believe will happen with pretty much any significant sized

enterprise company in the next five years will have their own open source program office

because it’s just becoming that important to their business infrastructure and i kind of see the

osbo or open source program offices the heart of open source within the company i think that it’s definitely very

important to have that central point for people to come to and ask the questions particularly because there’s so many

around compliance security and everything related to open source and the way that you describe the four waves of open

source i thought it that you had a very similar perspective to mickey mccauley when it comes to describing those

different waves and meki was actually a guest on the podcast he also works at ibm funnily enough

but if i recall correctly meki explained the evolution of open source in three waves rather than four and he

explained that the first wave involved individuals who wanted to scratch their own itches like you said

and it turns out that they obviously saw the merit in reusing the code that others use and they also understood

the benefits of sharing it and building upon it to become experts themselves down the track then in the second wave he was saying

that people recognized that they had all of these collective libraries but they didn’t have a way to build upon

them so they ended up providing the value in the form of services and then the shift from product to

service meant that everything became as a service and at this time companies knew that

they had an itch but they didn’t necessarily want to scratch themselves and instead they wanted

others to scratch it for them he then defined the third wave as i mentioned at the beginning this podcast

um the enterprise open source strategy phase which i think you definitely definitely hinted at in in your fourth

wave and that’s happening now because companies are finally coming to terms with the fact that

open source isn’t just in it it’s in every area of the business well uh i i think that’s true i think

it’s also interesting that some people look at what’s happening in open source today and you know some of

them basically are saying wow this is kind of concerning you know because you know it was mark andreessen that

famously said you know some time ago that software was eating the world right and then some people observed about 10

years ago that open source is kind of eating enterprise software and if you think about it you know give

me a name of a new enterprise software company that’s emerged in the last decade you know

there really isn’t uh anything that comes top of mind in any significant fashion

and so in this world where everything’s becoming as a service will open source thrive because

one of the other challenge that has been a hot topic in open source for some time now is how do we make it sustainable you

know there’s some people that have tried to come up with some of these innovative models where you know you can

be an open source coder and you can kind of get sponsorship right or something like that or you can become an open source coder

and kind of do piece work and it doesn’t always necessarily provide a robust comfortable standard of

living if you’re kind of doing work hand-to-mouth like that but companies like ibm you know they support

their developers doing work in open source because it fits into this bigger picture right so

you know some people have said well gee maybe in the future only cloud companies or major tech companies will contribute

to open source because there’s really no opportunity for individual developers i

think the enterprise angle is the solution to that concern because it’s not just the big tech

companies it’s now midsize and even startup companies right there’s a very innovative company out of

ireland called near form that emerged out of the vibrant activity around the javascript

community and they have created a model in which they can engage with clients help them quickly

leverage the power of javascript to provide rapid application development

change in their organization and do that in such a way that it works

for near form it works for their clients and it helps support the open community around javascript i think

the other interesting question is you know what’s next you know is there a fifth wave and uh i

think part of that fifth wave is going to be the influence of open source in industry verticals

because one of the things that open source has been quite successful with is it’s basically uh some people like to

call it the plumbing right it’s the common infrastructure does the world need 12 operating systems

it’s always a very interesting question but as open source has kind of moved up the stack there now seems to be this

opportunity for other industries to innovate and one example of this

is you know the linux foundation has supported the creation of a sub foundation called the lf energy and

it’s principally focused at the electrical industry and you know why would they use or how would

they use open source and if you think about it just like you hear people talking about in it you know software fabric

or you know network as a service the ability of a utility to move away from the old

model because if you think about you know electrical infrastructure you know how do you buy

from certain vendors and yet have interoperability of the electrical grid

and how do you get away from the very expensive proprietary electrical grid

infrastructure and try and move towards something that’s a bit more affordable and a bit more

flexible right and if we’re going to as a society make this big pivot

from fossil fuels to a more renewable electrical future certainly

there seems to be an opportunity for open source software to provide a substantial

layer of that infrastructure that can be effectively shared across members in that industry

vertical so usually just one example a certainly open source in healthcare is another example right

one of the things that happened out of the covid situation was that company i mentioned earlier near form

was able to work uh to quickly develop a contact tracing app by collaborating with apple

and with google around the android operating system and come up with a way that phones could

be aware of other phones around that and yet still maintain the privacy of the individuals

it’s that kind of rapid innovation that i think will start to impact other industry verticals

so there’s there’s my call for the fifth phase that’s exciting and it’s definitely in line with something that a previous

guest in the podcast carl eric moles he is working it to bricked was previously the head of open source at

sony with a whole episode on open source in the automotive industry and he was having a conversation with

the head of a large truck company in europe and they were saying that in the next five years they don’t

think that the development around open source in the automotive industry will be much different to it is today but within

10 years he sees a significant impact on open source

particularly from the automotive industry which is exciting but i’d now like to shift gears and

focus on open source business models so can you touch on this concept and explain how ibm is

monetizing open source technologies today sure it’s funny because um uh in

the before times when we still went to conferences uh i would collaborate with a colleague of

mine stephen wally and we’d actually do a bit of a debate on the topic because

he had created this you know very thoughtful pitch on why there was no open source

business model and i suggested to him three or four years ago now that hey why don’t we do a sort of a next

generation of your thoughts here and do it as a debate and you can take that position

there isn’t one and i’ll take the position that there is and so we’ve done that uh and had a fun

time doing it the developers in the crowd always seem to kind of enjoy the give and take of it but the net of it is

is that he argues that open source is really a distribution method and a highly

efficient way to create software at scale because

again this concept of reuse this concept of you know collaborative software

development and giving you the opportunity to rapidly share because of the nature of open source and

the licenses being certainly you have to pay attention to whether the license you use is a bit more permissive or whether it’s

restrictive but he looks at it from that engineering perspective and i totally

you know respect that point of view but i also think it’s missing something if you just say well

there is no open source business model because you know look at firefox for example you know they

they survive in part on ad revenue right and so you know that’s that’s their

model and you know look at look at github right i mean people were shocked in the

industry because github you know became sort of the most dominant repository for open source

software and you probably know this some of your uh audience may not but

github was based on git git was developed by linus to help him deal with you know the

complexity of the linux kernel development and github was one of the few companies that

took the open source git software and said we’re going to put this you know user-friendly

ui wrapper around it and other value add and that was their model and so github

got to a certain size where again they were the the half of the software

created an open source lived on lives on github but the ability to monetize that

was underperforming dc expectations and there were rumors in the industry

that oh my gosh you know what happens if they flame out what happens if they don’t get to a sustainable business

model and they turn the lights off that would you know would have been tragic and so

lo and behold people were very surprised when suddenly the news broke that huzzah

microsoft is buying github and not just buying it but buying it for seven billion dollars

and incredible yeah i joke to steve that sounds like a pretty good business model to me

wish i’d thought of that and it was a it was less than a year later that ibm announced that they were buying red hat

and if seven billion dollars sounded expensive 34 billion dollars is quite a bit of money as well but

it’s just a validation of the fact that open source is here to stay that some

people will look at some of the warning signs and predict the sky is falling but

somehow open source continues to sort of evolve and survive and that it’s going to continue to have

significant impact in vertical industries as well as you know it’s changing fundamentally a

lot of things that are happening in intellectual property and in research and

other things definitely one interesting thing that amanda brock said on the podcast was open sources

like gravity it’s here to stay you’ve got to accept that it’s here and move on knowing that it is here to stay

so i think that definitely does resonate with some things i’ve heard in the past but that’s all we’ve got time for today

thank you so much for your time jeff it’s been amazing chatting to you getting to know you uh and also

just learning so many things in this podcast and on a previous call we had so thank you henry it’s been my pleasure um wish you

uh continued success and look forward we’ll have to chat again sometime in the not too distant future

definitely i would love to and for everyone who’s listening thank you for listening if you’re watching this thanks for watching

uh if you’re watching this on youtube then please leave a like and comment letting us know what you think uh also subscribe to see more content

like this and do the same on apple podcast or spotify just to really stay up to date with the

latest news in open source so thanks very much everyone thanks jeff until next time thank you

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