About
In this episode, we have an insightful and entertaining conversation with Gil Yehuda, the Senior Director of Open Source at Verizon Media. Gil is the number one expert in the world when it comes to setting up and managing Open Source Program Office’s (OSPO’s) for enterprises.
Some of the topics that we discuss in this episode include:
– What is an Open Source Program Office and why they’re so important to enterprises.
– Why an open source friendly approach attracts great talent.
– How and why Verizon Media open-sources some of its proprietary software.
– The key to effective community management.
– The future of open source software.
Transcript
hi everybody my name is henry badgery and i am super excited to welcome you to the
first episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams
the open source services marketplace where users of open source software can find vet and contract with service
providers in this episode we speak with gil yehuda who is the world’s top expert when it comes to
creating and managing open source program offices within enterprises in this episode some of the
topics that we will discuss include what is an open source program office and why would any company want
one why an open source friendly approach attracts great talent
how and why verizon media decided to open source some of its proprietary code
and last but not least the key to effective community management so are you ready let’s dive right in
[Applause] hi everyone my name is eunice i am and i i am the ceo at open teams
henry and i are very excited about this podcast series this is our first episode with gear
yehuda the senior director of open source at verizon media verizon media is home to media
technology and communication brands that nearly 900 million people across the globe
love and trust some of the brands that you may know include techcrunch yahoo and half post
gil is widely known across the open source community and many consider him to be one of the pioneers of what we
call an ospo that stands for open source program office
gill is active on social media and can be found on twitter at g yehuda and also on linkedin
i’d also recommend to anyone listening to go out and check the impressive work that he and
his team have been doing to fight covert 19. uh they recently released a potentially life-saving tool
using their open source pro open source search engine vespa so since i don’t want to spoil the
episode for you we’re going to dive right in gil thank you so much for joining us today thank you for having me thank you
both it was a very lovely introduction eunice and i are really really looking forward to this episode so
let’s kick it off i i know that you’ve published a lot of articles you’ve given presentations all around
the world and i definitely consider you to be a thought leader in the open source space but when researching for this
conversation i learned that you didn’t always have a positive view of open source
so can you take us back a bit to give us an idea of how you got here today
so that’s true and it’s peculiar to look back and and to
think about it from you know from where we are today to where i was many years ago but when i first heard
about open source it didn’t make sense to me um and i didn’t think it was a good idea it sounded like
um people were sort of a hobbyist were voluntary voluntarily putting code into some
not particularly structured or organized common area and the hope was that great things
would happen and it just didn’t seem very strategic it didn’t seem very reliable it didn’t seem like you could run a
business on it um and i sort of i just associated it with with like this frivolity and hope um
and the truth is i was i was wrong with that um i simply was mistaken and i think that a
lot of people who i think there were a lot of people and maybe still are who hear about open
source and they sort of assume it um to just not make sense and to not work with them
so what i did is i learned more actually i was exposed to some really great thought leaders in
open source and i just listened to them and challenged myself well maybe maybe i’m mistaken and
and when i heard more and learn more i realized that this isn’t frivolity this isn’t like you know hey let’s give
code away and see what great things might happen there’s actually a business strategy around it
so um i was impressed that’s awesome well i think what i’m
curious about is you know what was that big realization
okay so there was this there was this interesting realization i had um and then i looked back and and it
sort of like concretized it for me um when when i was growing up and when many
people were growing up we were told that you know you don’t want to trust strangers from the internet and you certainly don’t want to get into
a stranger’s car because that’s dangerous right i mean strangers from the internet and a stranger’s car seems like a really
bad idea and yet getting into a stranger’s car on the internet is actually a multi-billion dollar business proposition right now
right and staying in a stranger’s house on the internet is a multi-billion dollar business right we we are doing things right we do
things that completely made no sense way back when because strangers were untrusted entities and interacting with
them was something that you that you incur a certain risk and what we realize is that if we change
something about that dynamic so there’s a trust model reputation system a way to compensate if there’s a problem
it doesn’t mean that all problems go away i mean occasionally there are real problems but the bias of saying oh that’s crazy a
stranger from the internet i’m not going to get into their car is oh no abner you know punch in and say
hey stranger from the internet please pick me up i kind of know enough about you to trust that this transaction is going to work
well and that’s what in that’s what open source is a stranger from the internet is giving you code that you’re putting
into production and you’re able to do that because you run a test case and you and there’s all these other
people that are testing that code too so it isn’t just like hey a stranger is going to write the code for me
and everything is going to be good it’s i have a business model that regulates what was
previously a risky transaction and now it’s a business transaction and i’m okay with that
wow that’s powerful that’s really powerful especially from the change that we’ve seen over the last decade from
not just open source as a whole but also so many other companies have emerged
you know into hey i welcome strangers obviously there’s some differentiation you know in in
in things happening but i think for for those listening today and from the transition that you’ve seen from you
know not being so pro i’m open source until like you know you talk about open source is so much
passion um i know today you’re an open source pro you you manage an open source program
office i want to know what exactly is an open source program office and you know why would any company want one
okay that’s a great question um and oh so there’s open source which is you know
this the code a program office is an organizational structure inside of a company sometimes it’s just
one person in a role and sometimes it’s a small team but it’s a part of the company
that is the center of competence or the center of gravity or the plate the go-to place for the
open source related issues the company has to deal with for companies that write software
it’s the the person or group of people that help them understand um what are the license implications of
the software they’re interacting with and for groups that publish software for
you know distribute software then they sometimes handle compliance issues around the distribution of software with
respect to the license in many cases they help with getting stuff onto github or
you know to publish open source code or to participate with foundations or to work with other communities around
growth or fixing code or launching new projects or strategically deciding i have two open
source projects which should our company use and do we know enough about the dynamics of that
community to help us decide how we want to strategically use one of two open source options or open
source versus a commercial option these decisions are made by companies the open source program office
is the organizational structure that says we’re we’re the group of people that can help you because we do this all
day like we we’ve we understand the company and the nature of open source
to help make those decisions wow wow and in your prospective do you think
every company will use open source should have an open source program office within the organization
yeah i i kind of yeah i do i mean it’s um i think that a lot of companies
should have i think that more companies should have open source program offices than do uh it’s it’s no longer like this
you know luxury good for the big big tech companies um if if you’re a company that deals
with software you are most likely in fact probably guaranteed
to be dealing with open source software it’s it’s simply impossible to deal with software today and not
interact with open source so somebody is making decisions about your open source strategy
that you know sort of recognizing that framing it documenting
and sort of putting a bow on it and saying yeah this is their open source program office seems like a great way to get
accountability and consistency in those questions so i think that other even smaller companies
that um maybe didn’t think that they need an open source program office they do need to have that role maybe
it’s a half-time person but it’s somebody who should understand
the the behaviors of open source and how it impacts the company’s goals
i think yeah that’s imperative and it’s definitely a change that’s happening it seems within these companies not just
the large tech companies like you said but the smaller ones because i think people are starting to realize like we need to take open source
seriously like we everything is reliant on this our critical infrastructure is relied on open source software
and we don’t even know anything about licensing uh so that’s that’s great you guys are all feeling that role guys
and girls um what i found is that for a lot of these software companies there seems to be
this this shared belief that an open source first approach attracts great talent so can you tell me
please what does it mean first of all to be open source first and why does it attract talent
okay so it’s a good question um um i’m gonna i’m gonna be a little literalist about this i don’t know if i
don’t know about the word first i don’t know if if i mean i don’t know if open source
first is the the most strategic way of saying it i would say open source
friendly um because because everyone says for security first mobile first customer first
everything’s so first that how do you know which is first or you can’t have everything first right so um i think that open source friendly
is important and open source aware and open source strategic is important and yes it does attract talent uh and i
think that’s an important spillover um spillover benefit so we do open source because it’s
it’s we’re sort of compelled to by the industry we’re in we simply can’t not be involved in open
source if we’re involved in software but once we’re involved in software and we’re operating in an open source aware
open source friendly strategic we’re conscious of it you know we’re not we’re not we’re not um relegating open
source as um we’re not dismissing it um then then we get this
very interesting benefit uh engineers want to have engineers want to be consequential
you could be a hero at my company if you’re a great engineer you could be a hero at every company if you’re a great open
source engineer right i mean think about think about the the reach that you can have
if you’re the kind of person who can write the software that everyone in the world wants to use
i want to hire you right your software is so awesome that not only do we want to use it everyone else wants to
use it that’s exactly who i want to hire you want to be hired by the kind of company that recognizes that
pragmatically speaking from a training perspective i would rather you already know the technology than have to train you
on something proprietary so it’s just easier you know so from a hiring and a retention
perspective you want to stay at a company that recognizes and allows you to be a hero everywhere
so this absolutely um benefit uh from from a hiring perspective it
also helps to determine who to hire like if i could see your code and i see that you’re participating in
a project that i care about and can harvest you and basically say hey i see you’re really awesome in this
community by the way we’re building out a team in this community would you mind if we paid you a full-time salary with benefits and you
can continue to work on this project but you know you’ll have to like allow us to maybe assign the
the priorities you know because but we’ll pay you like it’ll be your salary it’s a win-win it’s a win-win and if you
don’t want to do you have to do it you can continue to do it on your own independently if you if that’s your gig fine
but if you wanted somebody to pay you there are companies who care about the success of the project and they’ll pay
you to continue doing your work if the company is is open source aware open source friendly
and gets it so i think it’s it’s important for the companies who really want to have those um those positive outcomes to sort
of step back to challenge their assumptions about open source as being trivial and sharing and whatever and
like hope say you think no this is actually how we’re gonna how we’re gonna operate um and and compete that’s that’s really
powerful i think any any of any developer today hearing and listening to this
will probably be considering hey maybe i need to invest more time into contributing to building open source you know
software out there um but what i want to think right now is like i want to step back for a second
and ask you you know maybe for a a developer that is within a company right imagine if you were
someone who worked at a tech company right now you know how will you pitch you know an open source program office
you know to a group of executive or convince your executive team about you know the power and the potential of open source
a that’s that is a very important question um it’s a very important question
you know i would explain to executives and unless of a pitch and more of a you
know let’s just take a look at our reality the reality is is that decisions are made on a daily basis
that either incur additional risk or additional cost or additional you know or give us
advantage and these these are decisions that are being made because of open source considerations
these are happening today and as an executive in a company you need to recognize what they are have
some sort of accountability manage course correct if they’re the wrong decisions at least know who you know know what
they are an open source program office is a management structure that allows you to do that
because without an office those decisions are being made anyway you just don’t know by whom
you know those companies who tell me oh we don’t contribute to anything in open source no actually you do you just don’t know
that your engineers are doing it on the side so you actually are you’re just ignoring what and you don’t know
where why or we don’t use any open source here no you do you just didn’t know it so
you know it so the the pitch is you have to be responsible for your technology portfolio and an open source
program office gives you the ability to have that kind of management control and responsibility
over those decisions figure out what they are measure whether they’re good or not course correct and then communicate that so that as an
organization you make those decisions um uh strategically and and wisely
one thing that comes to my mind when i’m thinking about this once you once you do set up an open source program
office then based off what i’ve learned from you today i assume that a successful open source program
office is one that returns a positive roi is this the case and and if so how do
you measure the roi of your open source program office that that is that question comes up quite a
bit it’s a very important question and um i’ll take i don’t know maybe two
two approaches to it one most of us think about roi in a
very transactional way like if i build a product it’ll cost me
a certain amount of money i will get return from the product open source and actually most
platform investments are infrastructural investments infrastructural investments return roi
in a very different way because you don’t monetize infrastructure directly
you monetize it through spillover benefit right that you what you know you build like you build
you build roads and highways and bridges right governments build all these institutions
and there’s no roi of the road right there’s no roi of a bridge the bridge improves commerce and
commerce provides the ability for people to travel across the valley to the store to then improve
up tax revenue for the community as a whole so the spillover benefit is the enablement of other things to
happen and that’s the challenge that infrastructure people have all the time which is you can’t really roi the infrastructure
you roi the capabilities that are enabled by the
infrastructure so infrastructure needs to enable those possibilities and
that means that that attaching the roi directly to the infrastructure
reduces infrastructure to product and then it’s then it no longer’s infrastructure and
it can’t be useful so i challenge the what’s the roi of it and instead look
for what the spillover benefits are and the primary spillover benefit for an organization
to have an ospo an open source program office is to have the capability to do all the things that ospos do
as a company to be able to bring in open source properly and know what they’re bringing in
and in a secure and supported manner to contribute to open source projects in a smart way
to acquire companies that use open source and to incorporate that into their you
know as part of integration to participate and change the economics
of open source in those communities that are important to it and to both reduce
tech debt and improve the option to sell product through open source so you can
directly reduce risk increase opportunity and bring financial benefit but in order to do
that the company has to be able to it has to know what these licenses mean and have to know what an open source
foundation is and have to know what they can or can’t do on a github repo and the open source program office gives
that that gives them the infrastructure to even participate in those money-making or money-saving activities
that was fantastic i think you really gave some some great almost like metrics that companies can actually base
uh the measuring of their open source program office’s success which i really appreciate you doing uh so one
thing that stood out to me in particular about verizon media when researching you and your team
was that you had published guides and videos all over the internet teaching others how to set up a pro open source
program office i love this mentality it’s very open source in nature and so for those of you who are
listening and interested in learning more about actually starting an open source program office and running one
then i really implore you to check out uh one of their guides which i will leave in the description below um
but otherwise i’d actually like to shift gears a little bit now as i know that verizon media manages
quite a few open source projects so can you tell me a little bit about these projects please
sure sure so um it it helps to it helps to understand verizon media as
a company it’s a fairly new new entity it’s really a combination of a bunch of other companies but
primarily yahoo and aol and the 50 companies that yahoo was
composed of and the 50 companies that aol was composed of and a couple of verizon entities so it’s
like it’s a mashup of like 100 of these companies under the the guys of these two larger
companies and all of these companies have been participating in open source for many years the you know i came in
um to the company through yahoo and i think that yahoo was one of the the more prolific
participants in open source so most of the the things that we have really come from that pedigree although not all uh you know
obviously the other companies that are part of our family have uh participated in in some
very important ways um we have a lot of projects and a lot of them are in the big data
space that seems to be an area that that we participated quite a bit in and we take a little bit of credit for maybe
even creating it and popularizing it with our work on hadoop and the greater hadoop ecosystem
bringing it to light um publishing it uh to apache software foundation and then all the
other projects around it but that’s not all right we do we do operate in other
areas obviously we’re very interested in security technology as is everybody and we publish a whole
bunch of security related technology projects we’re involved in mobile technologies we
publish a ton of mobile apps we’ve open sourced a bunch of things in the mobile space we do a lot with
devops and with you know folks who build software and monitor software that’s in
production and you know manage large-scale systems and we’ve published open source projects
uh in that area as well and we basically look at all of our our investments and say if we felt the
need to write the software because it was a novel problem that no one had really solved the way we
felt it needed to be solved and we invested why not share that like why not allow people to see whether
we did a good job to give us feedback to to use it i mean we’re not competing in this space it’s not that’s not where
we make money and by offering it they may find
uh use uses of it that we didn’t expect they might contribute some of that back or they might come back to us and say
this is wrong thinking like you shouldn’t have done it and and that’s important feedback to have because then we can
course correct and actually ask ourselves well maybe this is wrong thinking maybe we should rethink the strategy and we wouldn’t be
able to do that without open sourcing the code we talked about hadoop and i know that you contribute to hadoop
what do you think it would look like what are the benefits of of hadoop being open source and what have you noticed that say if you ma
imagine that they became closed source like what are the what’s the stock difference between the two um gosh what was the
the hortonworks acquisition by cloudera was uh i don’t know i don’t remember the number
offhand but it was a multi-billion dollar there’s a multi-billion dollar business there right so the difference between
hadoop being open source and not open source is you know a few billion dollars of of
market opportunity and the same with with um you know with a bunch of other businesses that were launched
from i don’t know former yahoos in some cases launched you know directly with the support of the company
so one one benefit is just the financial benefit of the existence of these technologies in
the open and the support infrastructure for others to use hadoop in particular
has been so revolutionary because really prior to that um there was this
model this operating model that was limited to the size of your database and you know by reversing it and saying
no we can actually have this much greater expansive view of data we now enjoy
these amazing products and services on the internet that you know feed us billions of tweets
and tons of stories on our walls of all types of social networks those you can’t build
something like that on a database you know you have to know that on an expansive
system a big data system that has replication and that has really the features that the big data
ecosystem provides it so it’s revolutionized the way we use the internet and it’s revolutionized the way we
manage our our software infrastructure i mean imagine if we still had all of those engineers
on our payroll having to fix every single thing for years and years and at some point
them leaving the company because i don’t know they wanted another job we would have to somehow own all the talent
in order to manage our own infrastructure and that’s a huge expense without the value for it so maybe back
henry to you to your roi question what’s the roi of keeping your code proprietary or what’s the cost
of keeping your code proprietary like why have you strapped yourself down to that tech debt that forever on after you’re
going to have to be the only entity in the world that’s going to be able to fix your code why would you want that why wouldn’t you
want other people to work on your code with you definitely i couldn’t agree more
that’s powerful that’s powerful uh and like and and i think this is you know what
you just said it’s like you know for a lot of people today the idea of giving away you know code for free
sounds you know perplexing um even for me it took me a long time to wrap my head around the
the notion of that you know if you open source your code you can actually gain many benefits um so what i’m curious is like
you know i know you mentioned a few times you know why anybody would give away you know the
code but how does it actually work i know verizon method puts a lot of you
know of code out there as open source but you know how do you like what is the strategy
behind it got it so i’m with you eunice by the way i’m with i also i also thought it was a hard
thing for me to wrap my head around which is you know why i didn’t think it made sense at first but you know it
took time and when i saw what it did um i realized that it can it doesn’t always work out well but it can
work out well so the mechanics this strategy around it we don’t we don’t just open source
everything and we don’t just you know put stuff on on a github repository and hope
you know because that’s not a strategy so it isn’t it isn’t the abandonment of process
but it’s a refinement of a process where a group will come to us and say we have this um so a classic
case is a group comes to us they say we have this project we want to open source it and we’ll challenge them and say well
why do you want to open source it what what’s the benefit to you what’s the benefit to the company and in that challenge conversation
we’ll learn things like why did you write this code in the first place what pro what unique problem does it
solve was there something else that solved it in many cases we try to have the conversation before any code is written
sometimes it’s a little too late we’ll ask them well do we use this code and sometimes we’ll say no we don’t use
this like wait a second how are we going to convince people in the world to use a project
that you couldn’t convince your teammates to use right that’s not going to work so well right so we ought to be able to prove
that this is useful internally before we ask people whether they think it’s useful too right so
let’s hold them to um to a measure now sometimes it goes the other way sometimes i’ll go to a team and i’ll say
when i do this i do this like a little bit of a trick i’ll go to a team and i’ll say we’ve identified your project as a
candidate project to open source um be prepared in about a month we’re going to put a version of your code
on github and they freak out they’re like oh my god we are not ready for this they they add test cases and they start
documenting the heck out of the code and they fix the code and i tell them three weeks later just kidding right but look at how much better your
code is look you actually have cases you’ve documented it we get value
even if we didn’t open source the code if we really threatened to do so because it forces us to think wait what
if other people look at this code it’s got to be great right so we uplevel our engineering
capabilities by recognizing that code could be public people could see
this of course they see the binary right they see the application and they have opinions about whether it
does the right thing for them what if they saw the source and they had opinions about whether we coded it right you know
that refines us so the mechanic is they come they ask we negotiate we figure out you know are we encumbered
by it is it strategic are there patents that we have to um uh that that that were uh filed on
the code um that we’d need to talk to the patent uh lawyers what what licenses
um would be appropriate for this are we forced into any sort of licensing schemes or do we have options who would use the code
have we tested that like you say an engineer says oh people use this code how do you know
have you gone to a meetup did any like have you proposed to people would you want this code if we open sourced it and
did they say yes like yeah sure or enthusiastically yes like do did we do any of that vetting to
prove that there’s something here if so sure well it’s open source didn’t invest if not then at least we have this great
conversation to refine why are we doing this and who are we doing it for and what can we do with this that maybe
we didn’t think of so it’s always there’s always value and sometimes there’s actually a publication too
it is no secret though that starting an open source project is difficult uh like you said you don’t
know whether it’s going to be popular you need to do a lot of due diligence and attract a lot of things but i think what people actually tend to
forget is that managing an open source project once it started is even that much more difficult
so can you please tell me how you and your team go about managing these open source communities
you are right you are a hundred percent right that this stuff doesn’t come for free and it takes real management um i have a
team i’m very fortunate to have a team these are like the most wonderful people i know so i’m lucky an
amazing team they really are they’re um and they get it and they understand
technology and they understand people and process listen the fabric the fabric of any good
collaboration the underlying fabric is trust and a sense of belonging and psychological safety
that i can contribute to something there’s this duality of um the confidence of publishing
something out there and the humility of receiving a pull request and an issue a bug you know being told that
something wasn’t perfect so we try to foster the the kind of psychological safety
and trust within the community that we have your back we’re actually here to make software
better together and to do so like we can publish things that aren’t perfect and we can accept requests from people
who are perfect but together we’re going to make things better because we’re looking for improvement so we try to
foster that message we work with the people who are asking to publish the project
and really have them do the heavy lifting and saying if you want to publish this project it’s
really upon you to create this community and make make this happen
but then we become your strongest supporters so you’ll have to run a slot group or a
google group or whatever whatever um communication technology you want for your project and
we support a lot of them because different groups you know tend to different um modalities
some people prefer the meetup sort of thing nowadays meetups are kind of harder to do physically in person so you
have the outline thing right um but we tell them listen you’re you’re a representative of your
community you know your community better than we do right because your community is like a detail it’s like you know the machine
learning people who deal with whatever or the you know we will help you
we’ll we’ll set you up with the website you need and the social media accounts you need and with the infrastructure
will also help will have your back when issues come up so you know sometimes issues come up
sometimes there’s like friction and fight and like uncomfortable or legal questions
about how people participate and with what permissions and all that and and we want we want our project
leaders to lead the the conversation but we are right there behind them to say we’re going to support anything that
really isn’t about the technology but about the process we got that um and then you know we
promote their stuff we let them know when there’s a meet-up that they should be attending or
if there’s a conference they should be submitting a call a paper for so we track those things in advance and
help them you know prepare their presentations make sure that it’s it’s what we want to share in public and
then track adoption and then say hey you know did people listen to that podcast or or blog post
and what’s the reaction that we got and and maybe we need to go back and and clarify something or or fix
something so it’s a it’s a job like it’s a full-time job to make this work but again
that’s how you get the benefit if you just put the code out there and hope then it really isn’t it really isn’t strategic so we invest in that to get
those up those outcomes so it sounds like you definitely have it a lot of it most of it properly i want
to say all uh but i’m sure there are things you’re still figuring out but you have it seems like everything figured out
so i i can’t understand though that because you were one of the first in the field and the fact that we do know that being
a pioneer is difficult um you don’t have any blueprints to base anything off you you don’t have any predecessors to learn
from i can’t imagine that it was always so easy so to the benefit uh to benefit those who
are listening what were some of the key challenges that that you and your team experienced
to get where you are today you know it’s a good question and you know henry
you know i don’t know if i’m a pioneer and i don’t know like the the truth is i learn a lot of this i
learn everything everything i know is based on um a lot of lessons i
learned from really smart people and and from really good experiences with teams of people
you know this isn’t like anyone i don’t think people wake up and they know stuff i think that you learn stuff the hard way and i’ve
been doing this for a while so maybe you know so it sounds like i have everything figured out i don’t we run into challenges
all the time um i have a lot of people that i’m grateful for who who have
advised me and and much like our software gets better together our open source program office gets
better together you know i’m part of a group of of open source program offices and other tech companies
and i communicate with my peers all the time and i learn from from them every day and they i think
learn from me too i mean it’s it’s collaborative because because we believe in this stuff like we believe that collaborating
together makes things better not just for code but for everything we do um some of the early challenges um
ironically the the early challenge that i had was dealing with people like me
when i was on you know opposed to open source was to then just deal with other people who are like oh this is frivolous
and it’s a waste of time and why would we want you know people to to publish code in their basement over the weekends for free and that’s just a
liability of the company and part of it was like no we’re not talking about people publishing code in their basement for free as
like that’s not what we’re talking about here in fact some of that may be a liability like we we should
figure out what they’re publishing and just make sure that it’s not a problem right i mean we have a social media policy if it’s if it’s not part of
the business then whatever it’s not it’s their private stuff and if it is part of the business well we should know what they’re doing
because it’s part of the business right so maybe like but that’s not what we’re talking about we’re talking about something more strategic so
shifting the conversation from the the naysayers was part of it ironically when i got to yahoo i found
myself dealing with a little bit of an opposite problem which was folks who wanted to open source everything without really
um you know challenging well why are we open sourcing well because we wrote the code and shouldn’t die here it shouldn’t like
be locked up here it’s like okay yeah but then then it’s just gonna die on github so let’s think smarter like why are we
doing it who are we doing it for what outcome are we trying to get so part of it was like then fighting the fight whatever dealing with the people
who are like let’s open source everything and see if anything is good you know so it was finding that balance
between the the fear of doing anything and trying to figure out you
know to shift that to strategy and the hey let’s just open source everything because it sounds like fun
and they like well no let’s refine that into strategy because after all we we do have to answer to some of those naysayers and they’re going to perceive
what you’re doing is exactly what they don’t want to have happen so it was finding that kind of balance
of what can we do what should we do why would we do it how do we know that we did it well and then experiment a lot and some of
the experiments a lot of them didn’t work so well but after you do a lot of experiments you’ll
learn and and i think after doing a lot of experiments i have a better sense of what might work wow well
well it seems like you’ve had a i would say a very interesting experience throughout your career with open source
um but what i’m what i’m really curious about is you know what are you the most excited
you know with regards to the future of open source like what’s next wow
okay what’s what’s next in open source here oh man it is it’s a good question it’s it’s a
good question it’s also a difficult question because if anything if anything we’ve learned in
the past four months predicting things is hard okay like four months ago i wouldn’t
have predicted may 2020 to be the way may 2020 is right we wouldn’t it was the
bushfires right five months ago six months ago like or three years ago i wouldn’t have
predicted so predicting about predicting the future is very hard i’m gonna i’ll i’ll admit that what i am
what i am excited about and i’m looking forward to uh i’m concerned
frankly i’m concerned about like proliferation of
so many open source projects that it’s just hard to manage and hard to know that there’s like millions of projects
out there and for the next you know for the next person who goes out there they just don’t even know how to find what they’re looking for and they create
a duplicate of something that’s already there and the duplicate you know might have been better or worse but not
compatible so i’m kind of i’m kind of concerned about the chaos i know people are working on
some sort of registry or indexing and it’s a hard problem so i’m concerned i’m concerned about um
lock-in you know open source was designed to prevent vendor lock-in so we don’t really have
vendor lock-in but we do have ecosystem not really lock-in but ecosystem biases
so if you’re in an open source world in a particular world it’s kind of hard to
get out of that world just sort of in that sub-world and i want to make sure that we don’t
create accidental inflexibility so that you can pivot from one space to another so if you’re using one
cloud provider you should be able to move to another cloud provider or if you’re using one persistence technology
you should be able to move to another one and if we lose sight of the lock-in that we were
always really worried about then we might find ourselves accidentally creating maybe not legal lock-in but pragmatic lock-in so i’m concerned
about that idea of ecosystem bias is really really interesting to me and i was wondering if you could tell me have you have you
observed that in the space so far or you just think that it’s going to be something that’s definitely happening in the future based off what you see now
well here’s what i here’s what i have seen is preventing ecosystem bias sort of upfront
so we have in particular and i think other entities have as well strategically open source projects
intended to prevent a lock-in situation okay so we sort of see a play coming say
oh here’s an entity that’s publishing something i absolutely understand why they want this to be published
because it benefits them i’m going to publish an augmentation to that project that
enables me to use it without having to use their additional services in other words i’m going to make sure that it’s
keep it open right so i have seen that kind of neutralization of potential technology lock-in
but but i want you know i want to just get back because i don’t want to end on like i’m concerned about the future i also want to be positive
so i’m just going back through this quite well i am i am looking forward to to more collaboration and more
unification and you know i do have a positive view of the future where
when people work together and create value they they reduce some of the barriers
that maybe are naturally set up identity barriers belonging barriers who
who do i hang with and who do i get to talk to who shares my passions
open source enables us to sort of expand that to talk to people we would have never have met before and to create value
together with them in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to predict before and i think that makes us better people and it makes the
ecosystem better and i think there’s so much more runway ahead of us in open source
to do that and explore that and to get good at it that i’m really looking forward to the future of open source because i think
it’s it’s the future of how we as as you know people on this planet
can work together to solve hard problems you know we’ve solved easy problems and
as the planet gives us harder problems to solve i’m looking to open source as a fabric that allows us to trust to get
in a stranger’s car right to trust each other to to then do things that we wouldn’t have done
before so i have a positive view of the future this is amazing this is really i really
enjoy you know definitely looking not just at the positive side but also looking at what could potentially go
wrong um well to wrap this up girl what are some of the actions items that
people listening can take to drive change within your company so that it becomes more friendly
towards open source software okay what can they do to drive more change in the company um
i think they i think they first need to start with themselves to challenge certain assumptions and to
grow their uh mental model of what open source possibilities are at least that’s
what i did with me is like i looked in the mirror i said well i’m wrong let me figure out how to be
smarter about this and learn more and just take in uh insight i think that that people should
recognize that the naysayers are not mistaken they’re
they’re in the sense that they’re not you know they’re simply misfocused and if we present open source
as this hobbyist um you know opportunistic giveaway because i feel
good about myself sort of social signaling thing then the naysayers are gonna say i’m sorry i
just don’t see why i’m paying you for this like it sounds like a nice thing to do but i just don’t understand why the company
wants to rely upon this because i i have to answer to somebody and i don’t know how to answer to that
so so i think that people need to refine that and say yes i want to be able to interact and
express my passions on the side as a hobby with people totally but when i come to work i also
need to dress that up with strategy and with better outcomes and with looking at what happens if i don’t open source or
if i don’t work with open source communities or utilize open source strategically and what happens if i don’t participate
so let’s look like what would happen to a project if i take an open source project i fix something and i don’t contribute
it back like what could the end result be with that kind of behavior probably not good
so how do we fix that well let’s talk let’s understand why you want open source everything and
why you want open source nothing and figure out what are you really saying so that we can figure out what to
do as a company i think when people come in more strategically they’re going to be
received more strategically and they’ll be more successful one thing that’s been a common theme is
this idea of being extremely strategic with your open source program office um that was something at least i found
throughout talking with you so gil thank you so so so much for your time and for sharing
these amazing insights it’s been a fantastic episode thank you you’re welcome thank you thank you both
to those of you who are listening uh if you want more content like today then please like the video and also
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[Applause] you
