The Trust Over IP Foundation and LF Edge

hi everybody i’m henry badgery and welcome back for the fifth 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

joining us today in this episode of open source for business is wen ching chu wen xing has been

working in open source for the past six years now and is currently serving on the technology advisory council at

the linux foundation we’ll be diving deep into two important initiatives that wenjing

has been working on at the linux foundation and they are the trust over ip

foundation and lf edge we also covered a few really interesting topics

such as what industries have embraced open source software and what industries haven’t

what are some of the biggest mistakes that companies make when either using or contributing to open source software

and what is wenjin most excited about when it comes to the future of open source software

hosting this episode is yunis shenzhou the vp of partners at open teams so

if we’re all ready let’s dive right in [Music]

wenjin thank you so much for joining us today i’m very happy to be here thank you

awesome well wendy we we we would love to get to know you a little bit um on this podcast can you take us back and

explain how you got here today uh certainly yeah and so you know open

source uh it’s a fascination a fascinating

phenomenon i think a lot of us are getting to know more and more of it but there really is history goes back uh

much earlier to the you know sort of the foundational days of computing itself

in the early days uh uh software is often open source as we will call it today but

it’s a it actually takes quite a while before what we known as a commercial software

become a reality and there’s a lot of you know well established laws and practices etc but

open source the concept of giving out the software in the source code form

uh to sort of encourage experiment and uh innovation uh it’s not uh all that

so it’s not new at all and so that’s been around for a long time and so my uh like you mentioned earlier

my involvement started in open source about six years ago

by my own experience i think a lot to share with open sources it’s definitely

earlier it’s in my research days when i was working on operating system and we

without even thinking always naturally start to you know work on bsd that’s the open source

unix implementation from uc berkeley and uh the new tour chains so we work on

tcpib stack and all that is uh essentially open source

the remote structured or you know we’re going to talk about linux foundation for example

uh way of doing open source happen a bit later uh but these uh so

myself i started about six years ago um there was an effort at the time to

expand the um the way of using open source uh into

other industries uh a way uh you know expand from i.t to additional uh

industries uh that i think we think uh at the time that it will benefit from

open source and the the first project we started was uh for telecom industry and networking and

all that equipment and it’s very complex and expensive to develop so

the the concept i think people came up was a network function virtualization

it’s essentially a way to implement typical telecom equipment

using software and general software based on off-the-shelf you know general

servers and computer equipment that we are familiar with so that’s the very beginning and that

end up in to i think later on the organizations call aof networking and so these particular

communities are op and fv as they’re still working on a lot of uh very interesting things to get

telecom industry into that new space so that model worked really well so it’s been expanding to

many different uh industries as well and you know including the two of us two of the uh projects or communities

that we’ll talk about today wow that’s that’s great i know you touched upon the different industries

and i’m actually quite curious to know what industries have you seen are at the cutting edge of of using open source and almost a head

and then also on the other side of the spectrum what industries are considered behind when it comes to using open source

that’s an excellent question and and as the concept of open source gets

more and more understood and accepted some of the benefits are clear and one

of them we mentioned always is that because it’s all open source

so a lot of um restrictions or intellectual property

you know laws and and the rules that companies may impose all disappear so um there are definitely

downsides on that but the benefit of it is that all of a sudden the innovation happens so much faster right yeah and um so

you you will see that in cutting edge areas especially i think

today we think of as ai research or machine learning or deep learning research

uh a great example of that because this whole field happens so quickly involving

so many people so many ideas coming from very very different background you know from

from um sort of like you know pathologist to all the way to

psychology to computer science to engineering to commerce

financial systems all that can combine together and it’s really hard to maintain the old

silos or the traditional way of doing things so whoever opened up tend to

get ahead and that’s the benefit of open source and i think these are the areas where people

tend to push this a lot faster all the industries like we mentioned

telecom and you know in some way iot which are essentially

embedded devices these tend to be more fragmented in in the past and you have a

you know small segments of a market tend to use incompatible solutions

that’s probably i think historical partly because uh the engineering involved into

the hardware system has to be in a way handcrafted for specific use and so with the porting

and all that is uh is harder but all that is also changing today linux is very

dominant really we’re all using some flavor of linux in a way

and so there’s a good hope that this way of a more um consistent and open

software would be able to actually help those industries as well okay that’s great yeah we definitely our

advocates in terms of progressing open source forward and it’s great to hear your perspective especially in an industry like telecoms

which i think historically is a bit behind when it comes to technology but it’s good to hear that they’re getting on top

of that now just on on a similar note what is an area of open source that you’re actually most excited about

yeah i very much want to talk about this and the the most exciting thing i think

is happening is uh the the work um trust of iep foundation is doing

not just but this particular foundation but all the other communities and organizations around the same effort

which is to establish trust uh on internet and all the digital systems

we use today so this goes really to the very

beginning of designing the internet uh

you know if you go back to as early as 70s maybe 80s uh when the initial internet protocol

that the portal said we know as tcpip was designed and there’s a bunch of

principles these initial researchers and engineers followed

and unfortunately trust is or you know it’s not one of those

principles we talk about maybe openness like how everybody can be part of it we talk

about scalability how this can expand to the whole globe and everybody be able to

all that sort of things worked out fantastically really nice i worked beyond people’s imaginations

but unfortunately a trust was not built into that and so the early day of the internet is

based on uh people who know each other you are all from you know universities and uh or a few

you know government labs and is assuming that everybody has good intention everything will work

out well um so those uh assumptions has not turned out as well and what we

noticed is that a lot of things we may not directly connect with that decision

but all the you know the the kind of things like fake news or social media issues um

and uh data loss of breaches of a huge of our uh private information

uh to hacking to even things like uh have to remember so many passwords

and um all that is uh essentially rooted on this lack of trust uh as a foundational building

block of internet so there’s a group of organizations and a lot of people really involved that

um trying to solve this problem based on um you know a set of ideas that

we think can really add trust back into uh internet and all the digital events

services that we’ll use today so uh trust of ip is a organization i

personally involved it was newly created within linux foundation it’s uh we launched her back in

june just days ago really and but i believe uh we

uh within uh what a month of time we passed uh more than a hundred uh

member organizations and and and people uh in uh awesome so there are huge uh

uh big interest in this um really excited and it is a very general it’s something

i think everybody uh would have feel the need um you don’t need to have you know

really technical background if you say anytime online you will experience uh the problem

of uh you know of these uh this lack of trust in in this system and

uh so we we hope uh this is a a a a really good opportunity for open

source to again um you know rally all the people from different industry

backgrounds work on the same thing and solve this problem yeah i think

what i’ll be really interested in and i know we’ve had this conversation um prior to this podcast but i really

like for those of those for those listening what are some of the examples

of um situations in real life that you know raise this awareness of of

trust over ip um if you could give some concrete example i know we’ve mentioned from

e-commerce to social media you know all the way to even like smart devices in our homes

um it would be really great to for the for the audience to know really you know some concrete example of what

that actually means yeah uh absolutely so um we we can

uh look at a few uh examples and one of them we uh mentioned uh is

sort of like a have to remember many many other passwords uh this is essentially a problem

of uh identity um so in you know in our uh how should we put it uh physical life

real life uh you carry identity with you so a driver license or a passport

depending on the uh use case and this identity uh we’re able to see face to face and

there’s many ways that we eventually get used to and we

have some basic level of trust that a person is who um you know he or she

is and and so that fundamental level of trust is what we can then deal with our

day-to-day life uh very um uh comfortably and in in the digital world that

disappears and um so what we end up with a lot of a patchwork and

this patchwork eventually uh becomes uh this

password we remember um so the technical solution when when people

come up with to solve a sort of identity problem what’s known as

pki so these are public key infrastructure is a set of cryptology that

we can use digitally to verify who owns what and specifically in our

day-to-day life will be the websites so these websites have these certificates that’s issued

and you can mathematically prove that that you know a when i go visit amazon.com it is

actually truly a website that’s been maintained by amazon not a uh yeah so that’s very important

unfortunately we don’t do that for each individual so we cannot

uh including amazon for example if i log into that or if i access amazon they don’t know who i

am i have no way to know the only way is that this account id and password but that

is very problematic because those numbers are very easily lost it’s very easy to hack and get

those information and so the you can see the mechanism on

the two sides of the conversation are not the same and the primary reason i think is because we

design this system to really uh it’s kind of heavy so uh

in in the early days people thought well you can only do that sort of thing for a whole website not in to

any individuals and also there’s no one sort of who’s going to give that so you

know we have a government that give out a identify but

who is the government in the internet to give out id so those are the the issues you can see

sort of technically why this didn’t happen and there are many other reasons it could be the you know large

corporations like amazon and google for example would prefer you stick with them because it’s also a

way to sort of like keep a user into as a customer because you make it sticky

right that’s the word make it sticky so if you use a google login all over the place then you cannot live

without it and it becomes your identity is essentially been

outsourced to google and others and of course you know for them that’s a benefit and they would would

like to keep it that way um but there’s a downside to that

as well and that’s our our digital life is really complicated and you

you have to keep remembering where you are and how you’re doing i don’t think any of us can potentially

uh i mean we truly sort of like be aware of all situations that’s why we are always

vulnerable uh all of us right so so those are that that’s you know one

sort of a bigger example i mentioned the fake news and it’s essentially if you apply the principle

involved to human to a digital media a particular movie

or you know anything and that also have exactly the same issue and

it’s scalability issue the issue of who’s issuing the uh uh the id for that particular file so

you know that is authentic and once you you know that apply to like iot your mobile

phones your camera or that so it is really broad that’s great and

i think that’s very interesting and i and i think you just mentioned a lot of examples from an individual perspective

i think i want to shift guests a little bit and think from it from a company perspective right what are some of the things that

companies are doing right now and you mentioned right most companies want their products to be sticky they

want more consumers to be there and that’s why a lot of information can get lacked over

the internet everything from social media to the devices that we bring in our home and we we kind of don’t trust them but we know

that they are useful to us so what i’m trying to think is what are some of the things that companies on

their end right can do or are already doing um to bring more trust in the products

that they put out there yeah most of the commercial companies have sort of uh both um i mean they one side

we mentioned they may like that they make their users more sticky to their service

but on the other hand i think they do see that these uh really

vulnerabilities uh in uh you know in things like um losing the customer’s

private data to hacking or fake news and all the controversies

that it caused has a business uh cost to it and they see that

for in the end in order to expand their digital services to more customers into

more areas they recognize they need to solve this problem too

the i think the the the challenge of solving this problem is that somebody

has to stop on somewhere because it’s so entangled into everything we do today

and that’s why it requires a community sort of approach to solve the problem i

do believe that most of the companies would eventually in the long run right see the benefit of a more decentralized

and also much more stronger guarantee of

you know identity and truthfulness in in the internet i think that would eventually make

everybody better off not just for consumers but up for businesses as well

yeah that’s great and it’s a very important project that you’re working on and it’s great that you’re working on it too with the linux foundation

but i wanted to focus on also another important project which we discussed previously and that was lf edge so could

you please tell us a little bit about that certainly yes uh edge

or venezuelans the edge foundation uh it’s a it’s another those examples where uh i think open source

start to branch into a different area and in this

case is uh you know i think people use the word edge and sometimes iot sometimes

embedded systems um what what that we are seeing uh

a lot of time people use the word edge to sort of in contrast with cloud which is sort of

a in our imagination will be large data centers right

and uh and but more and more things are coming closer and closer to so-called the edge

of network and so the examples we we tend to think of is a really in the

network is naturally a boundary where at the consumer side and the provider side

so uh where things close like a boundary we call edge

and that can be our online camera for example it’s an edge device but it sits in our home so it will be on

the consumer side of the edge on you know this side of

that boundary and you may think of it as a you know a wireless base station or antenna

that sometimes you can see in your in your neighborhood and those will be devices on the other side of the edge

so if you imagine there’s an invisible line between the two that’s reality where the interface is

between a provider who gives you the network and also agree as a consumer using it

and so there are a lot of uh like as mentioned earlier these industry tend to be very

fragmented and specialized um there are good reasons for those

uh but most of those reasons i think slowly uh they are they are fading away and so

we think it is the time that we are able to apply a lot of open source software innovation

to expand beyond the data center or the the tools and software we build

for data center can be expanded in a way to reach these part of our system

as well so it will be bringing in you know efficiency make the cost go down make

the innovation faster and a lot of repetitive uh

work like uh you know offering systems and monitoring managing

remote devices and also security and trust that we were talking about earlier

uh can be uh really implemented in in this industry using open source

software and uh uh make really uh innovation go a lot faster

so linux foundation has uh worked with many of these open source projects they existed before

but these projects all focus on somewhat on edge and iot and

they thought it would be a good idea to have a common home so all these people working on different

part of the problem can then share their ideas and work together and that’s the really the beginning of

ifh it is about it’s reasonably new as well so i think it’s just under

two years i would say and yeah so i’m very happy to be involved with

this uh this project there are a lot of uh people from uh from telecom

from people working on logistics um from people working on like a small

gadget swinger from speakers phones uh television

and so um all these eventually can be powered by visa open source software

and so that you know businesses and startups can focus on their value add rather than this

baseline software that’s great i’m curious to know how can companies get involved with either

uh lf edge or with the trust over ipv foundation

so most of these organizations are pretty open and welcoming and this this is amazingly true

in um in trust over ip in a sense that because they focus

on such a fundamental problem so the people who join to

to participate in that organization come from all over the place not just

geographically from every country there’s a huge group of european countries and

organizations but also that they come from all different industries

so we have people who are you know working on financial they want

to use this trust layer to for example to do to detect um to stop um money laundry

for example um and also to give um

better digital services a payment and all kinds of banking services

for people uh who for example today cannot own a bank account um and so digital

service is a it’s a it’s a great thing there’s a lot of a very

i think serious consideration on how to make everything um identified and safe

you can imagine so there’s a lot of creation and innovation coming from that industry

there’s a people who work on healthcare and how to provide our digital service

in healthcare but keeping very strong privacy protection we i really like one organization

that is based on africa they uh run uh these digital

ids for uh like refugee camps so when you have a refugee camp you

sometimes this the size of it is almost like a small country

they don’t have any identifier or there’s no commas can happen so they issue right on the spot

ids for each one of them so they can have a you know simple banking service they can

know who is who and so there are many many different people involved and it’s a wide open you can

join corporations like us do pay a fee to sort of support the activity but the

individuals or non-profit can join free as well so it’s a it’s a great way to do

that um lfs on the other hand is you can imagine it’s more slightly more

technical so people who join tend to have some some work or something

they uh they devote to that it’s related to edge or iot even

that is very very open because i know a lot of people play with um

maybe raspberry pi or stuff like that and which you will fit in right there and so we we

know there’s a one project i want to mention

is hx for example would help these kind of devices to be able to

collect data and statistics out of the device easily so you would be able to then um

you know do your machine learning on on your side um there are offering systems

that support very lightweight containers these are very common on the cloud but on a you

know small tv little device you can actually run containers on it and you can reuse all the tools you

already built for your you know cloud application and to run over there so these are like wonderful areas i

think is relatively easy to get into and uh so i would really encourage everybody to also check

out what they can do and what will they benefit from that’s awesome that’s really great i i

i’ve enjoyed hearing the work that you guys are doing at the linux foundation um seems like it’s a lot of work that is

very meaningful not just for companies but for individuals as well and and a lot of the times that that is

really what matters um so now i really want to just ask a few questions on the practical side

um what are some advices that you uh you have for companies wanting to to

open source your software or get more involved in open source

uh yeah great question and this i you know i got this question a lot

either either a company who wanted to get in

uh to sort of figure out what is open source or about and how they can

either participate or benefit from it um or

within you know a company that i work with that different groups uh may say hey i

would like to either use or contribute some code to open source and how do i do

about that and uh so in my role i i give a lot of those uh

advice to many of these uh post organizations companies or product

groups within a company and i think typically what i would like to sort of

talk to these groups is is first of all find out what is open source all about

and so i talk uh a particular way i think the way we should see open source

uh in three different dimensions i call 3d open source view okay perspective you can put that

away and the three dimension is really one is technology naturally and two is a legal framework

in the end open source is about um you know sort of like intellectual property rights and how do we manage them

and the the third one is cultural of how the society is

seeing these things and how the developer community are seeing these things and all three things are very important and

they link together and make open source work um

so the you know like we we mentioned earlier in the early days of open source

how the the early day culture was pretty um i would say it’s a close-knit

um community and people really don’t you know trying to keep code from each

other yeah um and then i don’t know what are you seeing there’s a famous uh um it’s a

kind of a milestone in open source is that the young um bill gates wrote a open letter about

people copying code and he was uh quite i think pissed that yeah you guys

are stealing my code uh well i think the that the facts speak

for itself because we do have you know we do have yes one way we want to protect our

intellectual property rights we want to protect our labor uh we should be compensated for what we

do on the other hand we also want to see the technology get the wide adoption

and that’s beneficial for us too and you know you know how uh bill gates and microsoft

uh evolved uh you know these are probably we should do at another time uh they they come you

know at one point myself with sort of the opponent of open source but now is you know strong

proponent right and so we it’s very good the case study of how we see open source and how

it relate to our business goals so once they sort of understand these

[Music] this three-dimensional background of open cells then we can talk about

what is your business goal what do you want to achieve and you know do you have a like i would

imagine if you are in a very stable narrow industry

you may not want to do too much of open sourcing that’s possible but most of the industries we deal with

are growing and the technology is getting to more and more of our our lives and and different part of the

economy and so open source is really powerful both we mentioned for innovation because

this is just making things happen so quicker so faster and also that is good

for um adoption it allows a a piece of technology be widely

available remove all the barrier of adoption make them widely available and you know

you you can think of how do you i hate this word about monetizing it

in some other way right it could be services people do that it could be many many different

ways that this would happen so i think as a as a business decision maker you want to see

uh the pros and cons and also like what are your end goal is how do you want to get your customer uh

how do you want to work with the ecosystem all of us are a a

party in a broader ecosystem or industry and so hopefully i think you will find a

way that as many many companies do see it today

that open source is not only good for the community for the whole industry but also good for your own bottom line

as well i think that’s yeah companies it’s definitely something like you mentioned microsoft and the transition and change

that they’ve gone through it’s incredible from from calling open source of cancer to now being an open source first company

acquiring github it really is a a very very interesting story and tale but i think that’s why

companies they’re really taking open source seriously now because they understand it does impact their bottom line and so on that

note um i was wondering like what are some of the mistakes that you’ve seen like other companies make when either

using or managing open source software um yes uh so larger companies

tend to have a sort of like a open source office of some kind

and uh the reason uh i think these kind of organizations are very beneficial and

important for a larger company is because precisely that we have multiple

aspects of open source so i mentioned the three just trying to cover the basis there uh

you not only need to be a good technologist sort of understand what a certain open source

project you know pick any one of those and tensorflow how do you like it well you need to know

what it does you need its design the pros and cons what is really you know good at and what may

not be the perfect and uh who’s involved and so you you you do need to have a technical very

strong deep technical background to be able to evaluate a technical merit of a project

but you also need to sort of know like the open source governance intellectual party what kind

of license is being used you know do you care about a particular project like in this example or

in a way dominated by one big player is that a concern to you you may not be but you may right and

also that uh there are areas about the cultural things you know how that

community work and what kind of a sort of a direction they tend to go when uh you know a compromise

is needed which which way they tend to think so all those are very important

and usually one person can know all these so and also most of the uh groups or

product groups do not have all this uh knowledge with them and so an office in a way it

gives the sort of um you you can you know give a consulting service innovate

within within your organization so that’s one way to do it smaller companies i think there are a

lot of uh really wonderful startups today who really based their entire business on

uh on open source software and i know there’s a little bit of a struggling going on right now

i was from the classic open source versus the competition coming from cloud

vendors who uh commercialize open source software based on this uh sas model right

and and how to really compete in that the new environment also those are i think very important

uh topics not just for open source i think we’ll be misunderstand uh what open source is is today by

thinking of it as a as a separate thing i think you really need to think that

open source are so wide spread today is so fundamental part of our landscape that

it should be considered for all businesses in in technology at least or any of the other industries moving

that direction i couldn’t agree more and definitely after a few of the guests that we’ve talked on the show

gil yehuda guy martin they’ve all run open source progress program offices and they really define

it as like the center of excellence for open source because if you have an engineering team the engineering team needs to need a

place to go when they have a question or a problem so i think that’s that’s great and i think i completely agree with you that

they need to separate open source and take it a lot more seriously but i think that’s what everyone’s doing today and it’s great uh but what’s

really exciting at talking with you and hearing about your background is you’ve seen open source evolve a lot and obviously

working with the linux foundation you’ve you’re at the forefront of the open source movement so i’d really like to know what are you

most excited about with regards to the future of open source uh yes so uh

uh the the uh one thing uh for sure is that the the term open source even

you know evolved over time as well but uh the idea of what is open source or how to make

that work uh it’s constantly changing we mentioned yeah sort of a re-creation of uh

how do one to tune this thing for open source uh licensing models or how to make the

business work etc um i want to suggest that

we should again come back to my 3d model right we should not just focus on

existing framework we should also think take step back and think about the framework itself

and remember copyright laws are written by all of us it’s not like somehow somebody know the

answer and give out you know we we think through this and we fight it over and that’s how we end up with today

you can i think we should rethink how those laws need to uh evolve going forward uh people

you know in legal professions also start to think about the pattern laws for software and

there are huge areas that we haven’t really paid attention to that is that the data and data sets

and like machine learning models all of that

and how to regulate or protect those assets our

you know private data for example is a regularly collected and which we then turn into

some kind of model which eventually is software so in that sense we are all writing software

uh my piece of it i guess uh just by living and and so all of that needs some

kind of the intellectual property protection as well if you may um so how to do that is really important

and i know uh there are some you know uh people in uh in government in congress

thinking about that people in big corporations think about that we as individuals people advocate for

privacy should also think about that i was reading

i will mention andrew yem who’s been talking about this topic and one of the first politicians i think could talk about

this and so that’s very important that i know you may think well that’s not open source yes it is

that’s how you know we have a community putting our data together for a common good

and we should think about how to how that community should organize ourselves to govern ourselves

and make it sustainable and that that can benefit it for everyone so that’s i think

one wonderful area we saw people who starting to think uh new way of licensing

for data and also apply that to um to our day-to-day life in a i think

effective way right we probably don’t want lawyers to get into this

too much but in the end we needed some kind of a social contract in a way so yeah

work yeah so that’s really exciting and one way to come back to you know trust

over ip one way to achieve those is these uh this new identity system so that we can

have a authentic [Music] identifier for all these things

ourselves plus our data digital devices all these need to

have a authentic identifier so that we will have a system who will have a provable facts so the

technical word is verifiable credentials and so for people who really interested in this

the web world wide web consortium that will cvc have last year published a a pair of a

document specifying how to create these identifiers and also making verifiable

facts about these entities that are verifiable very strong

support um of the kind of division we are thinking about so i think is as if we are recreating

internet again and we hope this new one would have uh much more um

authenticity we can trust more feel a lot safer and also solve some of these uh

problems we we’ve been discussing today so i think open source has a lot of um

role to play not only giving out you know the source code but also

the a new way of making our ecosystem work and our community work

wow awesome awesome we’re waiting thank you so much for sharing all these insights with us today and thank you so

much for your time we really appreciate you joining us today thank you it’s very exciting you can see

uh there’s so many things we can talk about hopefully uh thank you for inviting me

here and hopefully we have a chance to talk more yeah definitely

so so those of you listening if you liked what you listened to today then please like the video and subscribe to open

teams youtube channel and if you’re listening to the podcast then please leave a review and let us know what you think next

episode we will be talking to hong kong deng the founder of

force asia and the vp of open source initiative stay safe everyone and until next time

thanks for listening

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