The Economic Benefit of Open Source and its Impact on Revenue as Well at Cloud Native Now 2024

Hey everyone. com, security Boulevard, and the rest of the tech strong family of, of sites. I'm really happy to, uh, be here today for Cloud Native.

Now, this is, I think, our fourth or fifth annual, uh, virtual event dedicated to all things cloud native. I'm even more thrilled to have as my guest for this fireside chat. A good friend of mine, we've, we were talking earlier, probably been, we know each other probably eight or nine years.

A lot of experience in the open source world. So much so that when he left his last company that he co-founded, he came over to the Linux Foundation and CNCF. He's currently the CNCF VP of Business Development.

It's my good friend Robert Reeves, R two. Hey Robert, how are you? Welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. Um, you know, the thing that you left off my introduction is that I am the dumbest person at the Lennox Foundation.

Well, that's, I always like to say I don't, I don't, you know, I'd like to be the dumbest person at the table surrounded by smart people that I could learn from, but I know you better. You're not the dumbest person there, but no, it's, No, they got a lot of smart people. They do Have a lot of smart people.

Yes, they do. Uh, and it, and it shows in the success of, of what they've been doing is particularly, you know, our audience out here is very familiar with Fi DF and lf and the, you know, how these play in daughter foundations and all Mm-Hmm. Done up as well as a shout out to the, uh, and f and the TDF, the Continuous Delivery Foundation and the Open, open source project.

And there's, I dunno, was there about 40 different foundations underneath LF these days? Mm-Hmm. Something like that.

So, all good stuff. But Robert, I, I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about the world of open source. You know, I, I've been in the tech space for long time, 30 plus years, and I've seen the open source model change and morph and evolve a whole bunch over that time.

Mm-Hmm. You know, we went, I always categorize it like in three eras, if you will, or epochs one is sort of the, the, the cathedral and the bizarre. Right.

If you, you know the part I remember it well. I was there, Dr. Stallman and all these people, and it was kind of a little bit like a Mideast bizarre where you could do by it's chaos, anything.

Chaos, controlled chaos. Semi controlled chaos. Then we got into what I call the kind of the big brother era of open source where Yes.

Basically an open, yeah. An open source project was managed basically by one vendor who was managing it for their own Mm-Hmm. Benefit, which kind of put a chill in other potential vendors, you know, contributing to that project because they would, they were, you know, doing it for the bit sole benefit almost of just one.

Yes, it had its moment in the sun, but that gave way to what I call the foundational era of open source. Mm-Hmm. And that's been with us now probably 10 plus years, whether it's the Linux Foundation or CNDF or, you know, eclipse Foundation.

Apache Foundation, Absolutely. Yes. Mold of our friends.

Yep. And what this did is that it allowed cooperation, it allowed otherwise would be competitors to cooperate for the good of all of us. Right.

That rising tide, if you will, raised all, all the boats. Yes, it does. But nevertheless, it was always, you always heard whispers, Oh, there's always Yes, yes.

There's always, you know, Is this open source stuff for real? How do you make muddy and open source? What's the economic act impact?

Is there an ROI? What about the risk? How do I, how do I, I don't have a throat to choke or a butt to kick if something goes wrong.

Right. How do I, as a big enterprise, put all my, you know, dollars into some open source stuff? And so there was always these little ankle biters, let's call 'em.

Yeah, yeah. The, the open source antibodies. Yes.

Uh, yeah. Uh, much like our, our, They're strong in some people. Oh, yes, yes.

Uh, you know, we, we've got 'em all over our, our cloud antibodies, uh, you know, uh, you know, procurement being back in the day, being an, uh, cloud antibody. 'cause they didn't understand, uh, how that, you know, uh, uh, I'm paying monthly on this. What?

Right. Um, but, you know, let me back up here. You know, because I, I do wanna start from the premise that, um, you know, do the old, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Uh, open source works. Alright. So I wanna be clear, and, and I imagine everybody that's watching this is, is in agreement.

But since we're talking about money, I think it's a good idea to kind of start with, uh, the foundational aspects of open source. And it, it works, creates better software faster. Um, it allows companies to do their strange and unnatural stuff to drive growth me.

But having a strong foundation. I think a good example of this is our friends at OpenAI, um, they were using and are still using Kubernetes to drive not only chat, GPT, uh, GPT, but also all of the GP workloads, uh, for training their models really. io and you can see their use case or case studies about it.

But, uh, this allowed them to very quickly when they needed to move from one cloud provider to Azure, um, for business reasons, um, they were able to do that super quick. And that's gonna be important later. Uh, open source, allowing you to move vendors quickly.

Um, we also see, uh, car manufacturers, car manufacturers are using Kubernetes to drive the compute that drives the CNC machines. So, back in the day, you know, my, my, my mom has a CNC manufacturing company, so I'm, I'm familiar with these machines. And there's, you know, always a little old dusty, beat up PC sitting next to that lathe at CNC lathe.

Well, this car manufacturer's using, uh, containers and they're updating it with Kubernetes. Um, they're focusing on building cars. OpenAI is focusing on building new models.

Um, they're not focusing on the underlying, um, infrastructure software. They rely on Kubernetes. And that's why open source works.

It allows you to focus on the things that you're really good at. Um, you know, US banks that love saying, we're, you know, a technology company, a software company with a banking license, uh, allows them to focus on this software for their customers. Not, how do I manage and orchestrate all these containers?

Um, how do I provision servers? Those sorts of things. So it works.

But the challenge that with these ankle biters, the antibodies that you're saying, is that their view of the world is one of two places. One, it's coming from a winner take all perspective that's coming from. And the second place is we need to build a boat.

We need to protect our market. And I would argue that both of those are, you know, um, bad. I would argue that if you're going into this, you know, winner take all approach, you might as well be a click diver.

And, you know, if you're a cliff diver, you're either world champion or you're dead. Uh, and there's not a big risk, uh, uh, or there's not a big margin for error. So if you're, if you're looking at the world in, in a winter, take all, and, and, you know, look, I'm based in Austin, Texas, um, and I've got a bit of a Silicon Valley bias antis, Silicon Valley bias, where I see winter takes all seems to crop up a lot in the Bay Area.

How are we gonna take over all of this? Um, and I would argue that if you're trying to do that with open source, you're looking at it wrong. Um, so those are my kind of, you know, declaration of independence, you know, key thesis.

I'll hammer them on the door of the church, do the Martin Luther thing. Um, and, um, sorry, I don't have what you had 95. What?

How many? No, I thought it was 17. I don't, look, I'm a Jewish.

What do you want from me? I've Got three. That's it.

Okay. No, and I, you know, and I don't disagree with any of the three, Robert. Yeah, I don't.

Um, but nevertheless, when we look at open source business models, you know, especially in today's world, people, you know, show me the beef. Show me. Yeah.

Show me the green. And, and people wanna see where, you know, yeah. I I what you're saying, is it wrong?

But is it really going to generate bed more profits, better profits? Is is there a real model there? Yes.

Can I build my business on it? Yes, you can. I, I, I built two, uh, I mean, I've done it and I'm an idiot.

So, um, you know, look, it, it, it all comes down to one thing. And that is you find a tough, a tough, painful, gnarly problem that's in a billion dollar market or greater, you're gonna do fine. Um, you need to, as a, you know, entrepreneur, your focus should always be on selling painkillers, not vitamins.

Um, you need to be in the business of making a really difficult problem, somewhat less difficult. Yeah. So, I'm reminded of this, uh, one of my favorite jokes.

All right. So my, my, my, my mom makes compressor parts. My dad's an oil and gas, so I get a lot of sayings.

And one of 'em is this joke about two hunters in the woods come across a bear, and one of the, one of the hunters just stops, hunter, the bear's charging 'em, the hunter stops. One of 'em starts praying, the other one starts putting on running shoes. And the one that's praying says, you're not gonna outrun this merit.

It's like, I don't have to, I just have to outrun you. I just gotta outrun you. Exactly.

So, So when we're starting companies, you don't have to aim for perfection. It just has to be a little bit better. Alright?

Um, and so, um, you know, the way to approach this is with open source, right? Because one, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, entrepreneur, you wanna make sure that there is a market there, there is something of value that people are willing to pay for. And, um, so, you know, um, if you have an open source project that you're seeing a lot of growth, it's free and people are starting to contribute code that tells you something, that tells you there's a really tough pain point here.

And so, uh, a good example of this is, you know, this kind of, uh, starting out is Hashi corporate Terraform. Um, you know, I used Vault back in the day. It was great.

Uh, and then we were like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Uh, we could start using this stuff in the cloud. This is pretty cool.

Um, but how do we manage that? And then here comes Terraform. Um, and so they had, you know, open source Terraform, um, and then they had, uh, Terraform Cloud, Terraform Enterprise.

Uh, the value add was, okay, what was the, you know, the last thing that I ran, keeping track of it. Because Terraform is just, you know, a TF file that the interpreter looks at and just makes the cloud look like whatever's in this file. Okay, great.

And, uh, so they come out with Terraform Cloud, Terraform Enterprise, which is value add. You paid for that. And so it helped you solve the problem of okay, who did what, where, and when.

Alright, that's good. That's valuable. Also, they added technology to manage state.

Um, and so, um, you know, that first model, you know, this value add model of how to make money, um, it, it's because they were in control of the open source software of the code base. Um, you had to find, sign a contributor license agreement whenever you submitted, um, uh, a pull request to improve it. Um, and so it was valuable for them because one, they could see is this worthwhile place to invest.

Okay. Yeah. Terra Penn's growing.

A lot of people are using it. Cool. And they use that to raise money.

Awesome. Dope. Um, but, um, it also allowed them to use this lead jet.

Well, you know, we, HashiCorp are the folks to do Terraform. You want more at Terraform, give us money for these other products. They have an inside track.

Um, and, but the problem is, is that with that approach, with that value add model, where you've got open core, um, um, you know, you're built around an open core and you're adding features and functionality, is that you're gonna have people always talking to you about, um, you know, viewing the open source software that offering as a competitor. This typically comes from venture capitalists or typically based in Silicon Valley. Uh, you also might hear from the sales team, um, you know, the sales team, well, I keep competing against our free offering.

If we didn't have a free offering, then, um, I could sell them something. Well, guess what? If you didn't have a free offering, you'd never have that lead wouldn't have anything.

You wouldn't have that lead. They wouldn't want talking to you. There would be not a thing.

So, um, the problem is, and you were mentioning this about your three epochs of open source, you know, that second one where, where you had the vendor control. The problem with that is the rug pool where, you know, HashiCorp changed the license on Terraform. It says that if you're using this for a commercial business, you can't use the free stuff.

You have to pay us. Um, you, you can't use this license. Um, what handful of weeks later, we've got insurance companies on a stage at Open Source Summit in Bilbao talking about we will never use this stuff.

We will never pay them money. We're going to open tofu. And there was a fork.

The problem with that, because HashiCorp was in control and was ignoring pool requests that we're going to add features that competed with Terraform open source, or I'm sorry, Terraform Cloud. Terraform, Terraform Enterprise. Well, the Open Tofu team can now take those pool requests and move them over.

Um, it, it's, it's, you know, the, the, the thing about this model is that you're never, you're gonna do, well, you know, as a founder, if you, if you're solving, you know, you're selling painkillers, you're gonna do okay. But you know, you're not gonna get, like start a rocket company, rich. Um, you're, you're not gonna get like nesting yacht rich, but it's still a damn good model.

Yeah. Um, there's a lot of folks that have done well with it. And, uh, I would argue that there's a larger, um, margin of error with open source.

Because if you fail, uh, if you don't see something, uh, with, um, and you miss the market, you're dead with open source. Your contributors in your community are gonna tell you what you need to add and how you need to market it. Um, they're gonna complain about stuff.

They're gonna say, wow, I really like this, but I really wish it did that. Oh, well, maybe we could add that and charge for that. Um, you know, so that, that's the first, you know, the value add model, um, open core, uh, we've seen this time and time again, and it works out.

The risk is that you're constantly fighting against people that wanna change the license, which leads to, um, you know, you're gonna lose some of your growth at the beginning. You also lose a lot of good faith. I mean, honestly, personally, I'm kind of mad about it because I've got pull requests, I've got prs that are in Te Terraform and I can't use them.

No. You know, like, wait a minute, I wrote the code. Crazy.

Well, but that brings up a whole nother thing is, hey, when, when, when your code is made up of people who wrote the code and quote, unquote donated that code, and now you went and changed the license on how that code is used. Mm-Hmm. Those people do feel like the rug has been pulled out.

They do feel like someone pulled a quick one here. Bait and switch. Yeah.

Well, and that's the, the next model. We start to see differences with that. That like your third epoch, you know?

Mm-Hmm. The, the foundation Foundational arrow. Yeah.

And so what we're starting to, you know, we saw this and, you know, 10 years ago when, when Kubernetes was released and we're, we saw, you know, the cloud providers, not all of the cloud providers were on board on day one. Um, Google was there 'cause it came from that, right? Right.

Uh, but the other folks were like, I don't know. Let's see how things go. And what happened was, is that all the end users started using it, uh, and they said, okay, now we need to be a part of this.

And the value of that is that when you put an open source project in a foundation where it's vendor neutral, and you've got a place, a a central place for governance, what happens is, is that you've got a, you've got the ability to make sure all voices are heard. Um, and you also, um, are elevating the maintainer, not the corporation. Right?

So the maintainer single person, you know, leus, he decides what gets into the kernel. And, um, you know, it's not, um, any other, you know, manufacturer. It's not a hardware manufacturer trying to, you know, he doesn't work for Nvidia, you know, he doesn't work for Intel.

Um, and so, um, by having a foundation that has, you know, independent maintainers and a governing board, um, what this means is that more people are willing to improve that. And the way you make money off that is you add it as a service. So we've got, uh, we've got, uh, you know, EKS, we've got A-K-S-G-K-S, Oracle's got Kubernetes service.

Every cloud provider has a, uh, Kubernetes service, but it's a fungible asset. So fungible, it means, you know, easily replaceable. Like bananas are fungible goods.

Mm-Hmm. Gasoline is a fungible good. Um, the good thing is, is that for the consumer, for the end user, that's great.

That means like, like our friends at OpenAI, we're able to move from one cloud provider to the next because of Kubernetes. Um, it also affords you the ability to lower vendor costs. Um, because everybody is trained on Kubernetes, it's much higher to, it's much easier to hire and retain individuals.

Um, you know, you don't have to worry about hiring somebody for proprietary software. Um, this model is better suited for larger organizations. The, as a service, let's take something that's in a foundation.

Let's offer it as a service. Uh, because what they have is other things that they can make, uh, money on. So, so, you know, AWS or Kubernetes, it's in alignment price wise with all the other cloud providers.

Um, I think it is. I assume it is. I it's been a while since I looked.

No, it still is. Yeah. And so, um, you know, but this is better suited for larger companies that can sell other things.

Um, and so, uh, you know, their AI service or, you know, storage and networking and those sorts of things, you know, you really make your money on the other things. Um, and, but EKS was the fastest growing service, um, for AWS, uh, and they were one of the, um, you know, uh, uh, late adopters of offering it as a service. Um, you know, the pro the, even though it's a fungible, good adoption skyrockets.

And so what you're able to do, you're, you know, you're Azure and you're able to say, well, we've got Kubernetes. Um, let me show how Kubernetes works with VS. Code.

Or, you know, uh, all the other add-ons. net application still running somewhere in my data center to Azure using Kubernetes? So that's how they can do value added selling, uh, around that.

And still say, Hey, we're offering this thing that everybody knows and trusts and likes 'cause it's in a foundation. But there's these other things that I have. So this kind of as a service model works really well.

If you're a large organization, um, if you're a small company just getting started, the previous model, a value add, just release it, open source it, see what happens to learn from it. Um, and, um, and, and you will, uh, if you listen to your community, you're going to do well. If you try and fight your community and, and do things like rug pool, the license, you're gonna have a bad day.

So Robert then had just kind of soak in this said, this is all great for companies where that open source software is, is kinda key to their offering. Yeah. It it's their product.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about consumers of open source software.

Mm-Hmm. And how, what's the impact on revenue from these companies? So for instance, we, again, we spoke off camera a bunch, but bank, right?

All the banks, Almost all it, it's crazy when you think about it because, you know, there was a time when you would've said, well, which companies, or which vertical would it use? Open source software? And people would say, oh, the financial vertical too regulated, too security conscious.

They don't control it, Don Anymore. That's all news, right? It, so, but, and, and why banks do things generally for money, right?

If it's not about money. And so this, why do we see banks adopting open source software? And, and then when I say banks, I mean finance sector, you know, adopting open, not only adopting open source software, but leading in the adoption of open source software.

Oh, yes. Yes. Well, there's gotta be an impact on revenue there, right?

Yeah. That's why You, you, you nailed it. I mean, this is like, you know, financial services in the United States is, is the crucible of capitalism.

Uh, you, if you're, yeah. You know, if it makes money, you're going to do it. And so, um, you know, the, the whole thing about, oh, we would never do open source and, uh, this, this reminds me of the intro to, uh, Stephen O'Grady's, new, new King Makers, this book.

Mm-Hmm. Hey, actually, you know what? You know, I, it, it's not a book.

It's a pamphlet. I mean, it, it's under a hundred pages. You gotta get to triple digits before your book.

Okay. So Steve's pamphlet, that's It. The New Key.

I'm sure he'll appreciate That book. Oh, I tell him every time I see him, I'm, I'm gonna see him in the fall at, at Mon Tober Fest. And, and every, you know, conference we have at Lennox Foundation, he's there.

Um, but, uh, the intro was about banks and instant messaging. Instant messaging. It was, oh, take it off, take it off.

Back in the day. And somebody asked the CIO of a bank, you know, well, well, what is your policy around instant messaging and compliance and stuff like that? And they said, well, we don't have that problem because we don't allow people to install it.

Uh, yeah, whatever. Uh, so a lot has changed since then. Just Real quick, I had a similar experience with the US Army with wireless.

I was on step, so at every army base has its own cso, I think they call 'em a doum or something like that, is the CSO for an army base. Mm-Hmm. Then an army base in Colorado.

And I said, what are you doing for wifi security? He says, we don't have a wifi security problem there. We don't allow wifi here.

And Angie said that, I see people throwing their WAPs under their table, right? Yeah. Because they had just plugged in the ethernet indoor a wap and this when they were mobile, right?

Yeah. And they would throw it when the do came walking by. But you're not gonna, you know, that's like a little boy putting his finger in the d**e.

You're not gonna stop the water from coming in. Uh, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, it's stupid.

And, um, it, it's really shows how out of touch, you know, they were in the past, um, right. But they've gotten smarter about it. And because it was driven by money, um, you know, look, th they are adopting open source because it works faster time to market.

They can test, uh, for themselves. I'm not talking, the open source is faster time to market. I'm talking about themselves.

If you build an application with open an open source stat, you're able to procure it much faster. You're able to, um, you have far more people that you can depend on to answer your questions or to hire, to build it. Um, it, if you, you know, uh, um, you know, cold fusion or now remember that, uh, I remember Cold fusion.

Yeah. So, uh, you know, perfect example. But we can also look at, you know, what, um, um, you know, pivotal was dealing with Cloud Foundry, kind of, sort of open source, not really.

And then here comes Kubernetes and disappears. Um, yeah. You know, Kubernetes washed that it was like a, a, a tsunami washing over a wall of these.

It wasn't, and I don't mean to pick on Pivotal or Cloud Audrey, there was No, no, it was Dr. Fans. I got a lot of friends up there.

Absolutely. But it's, you know, oh, just to complete that thought though. They're doing it for money and they're committed now.

And, and so the, the next step in this though is, uh, you know, honestly, it, it's really about vendor management. Um, you know, you, you had mentioned Throat to Choke. I love that saying, uh, so on Monday, who's, you know, was it Monday or was it Friday?

No, sorry. It was last Thursday or Friday with our friends, the crouch strike and now Microsoft and Yeah. Who, I don't play Microsoft for this bad.

Who throw who's, okay, fine. Whose throat does Delta? Chuck Delta Airlines?

They're still digging out, right? As I understand. Well, I got, but I have a bet.

You know, we discussed this on Textron Gang last week, not Delta. Whose throat does Delta customer want to choke? Delta's customer doesn't care that Delta uses CrowdStrike or that they use Windows.

Microsoft. Yeah. I'm Delta's customer.

I want to, I wanna choke Delta now. So you could go to America and United, you would've had the same experience, but you could have stayed with Southwest. 1.

Yeah. Um, no one, one of the few times that that helped that Yeah. That, that helped you.

But you know, seriously, that will be said, I think sometimes you lose sight of that when we talk about road to choke. You gotta follow that food chain down to the guy who's laying the dollars out, right? And, and in that case, it's the customers who were blue screened and, and, you know, missed flights.

Look, Look, the US banks, five largest banks in the us, um, are spending an ungodly amount of money on it. Um, and they still went to open source. So all of those large technology providers that they're paying money to, they said, no, we're gonna still pay you money, but we're gonna use open, uh, standards.

We're gonna use open source here. And so, sure, you can host Kubernetes for us, but we're building on Kubernetes. We're not building on any proprietary stuff.

And so if a cloud provider goes down, they're able to go to another cloud provider that has that, or they can self-host. And so the next step in this evolution is to actually get over the throat to choke and depend on yourself. You know, be think, uh, you know, uh, uh, think homesteader, think boomer sooner, Oklahoma, okay?

You're just gonna go out there and you're gonna get some land, and you're gonna build a sod house, and you're gonna be a master of your own destiny. And the way you do that is you hire a maintainer. Now, look, this is not my idea.

This is Kelsey Hightower. He just drops this knowledge every time he does our executive summit at CubeCon, uh, for mm-hmm. End users where he's coaching, um, not the technology providers, but the consumers of open source, these large enterprises, um, to, um, you know, how do we get around this?

And what he says is, hire a maintainer. Don't put them in a scrum. Don't give them Jira tickets.

Don't, don't try and fit 'em in the engineering principal engineer, you know, square peg. Don't, you know, don't, don't put them in that round hole with their scro square peg. Don't do that.

Don't put them in, don't Make 'em what they're not. Yeah. Just get outta the way.

Let them take care of the software that they're overseeing, that they're maintainer of. But, um, use that as a way of recruiting and, uh, retaining employees that really like that software. Like, like you're committed to open telemetry, bringing in a maintainer of that into your business.

Um, other SREs that really, like o Hotel. Like, oh, that maintainers at that company. Oh, I wanna work there.

Um, and so you're, it's gonna be easier on hiring and maintaining employees. It's also gonna be easier to check the vendor. So when a vendor says, well, we can have this out in six months and fix this problem.

And you're like, the maintainer is like, well, wait a minute. I'm a maintainer for that software and it doesn't work that way. How are you gonna do this?

And it can make sure to keep 'em honest. Um, finally last thing that Kelsey suggests is put them on at top tier tech support. Um, that they're, they're there when bad things happen.

Um, and they show up, uh, and it works its way up and gets, uh, escalated. They show up. That's forget a show a a throat to choke.

It's a person to fix a problem. And basically you're, you're hiring Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, you know? Yeah.

I solve problems. And So that's, but, so, but you, but everyone needs a problem solver like that. You know, Robert, you, you, you said something, I remember a time where there were people who said, Hey, you should rotate your developers to have to do what we could tech support every agree, quarter agree, or every six months, just so they could hear from real customers what the experience is and what the problems are.

Yes. And, and adapt. But let me, let me just play devil's advocate real quickly here, and I realize we're short on time.

Every company can't necessarily afford to hire a maintainer. I mean, it's great if you're one of these big banks that I could put, you know, 1% of my $500 million budget towards that. But a lot of companies out here can't hire a maintainer.

They're, they're counting on the community on the CNCF. Well, Sure. Yeah.

This is, as you know, to do this. Yeah. This, this model of, you know, how to make money in open source as a end user.

Um, you know, yes. Hire maintainer, vendor management, um, I, I'm gonna leave if you increase my prices and I can do that. But for smaller, you know, mid-market, you know, how do they do that?

How do they do this as end user? And, um, they can support the maintainers. Uh, this is by joining a foundation, um, or by, uh, providing other non-monetary support for foundations.

Um, you know, uh, uh, documentation updates, you know, dedicate So, so fine. You can't hire another FTEA very, these maintainers are very intelligent and, uh, well regarded and expensive. Yeah.

Yeah. And so not everybody can hire them. So what about dedicating a percentage of your dev team's time?

Is it five, 10, 20% to work on open source to look at bugs, especially the bugs that they've submitted, and to submit prs? And who knows they could grow a maintainer at that smaller company? Um, you don't have to go out and, and do the whole, you know, uh, major league baseball free agency thing.

You can No, you can do for, you know, sling development. It's not everywhere To be the Yankees or the red stocks. I, I get it.

You can develop your farm players and still have a, uh, you know, look at the, uh, Houston Astro Astros. You know that. And Well, don't, sorry.

I mean, don't, I'm a Yankee fan, so let's not go there. But A huge Astro fan. How, how are things going?

Are you in Austin? No. Hell yeah.

That's not good these days. But let me, let me let, we, we've only got a few minutes left. Robert, I wanted to close this.

Maybe you had a model you brought up to me, or an example that you brought up to me when we were talking in the movie industry. Mm-Hmm. Ah, yes.

Yes. Where This kind of cooperation between competitors, cooperation, whatever you wanna call it Yes. Call it really has resulted in, in good, good juju, right?

Yeah. Oh, With it share. And, and so this is, um, so, uh, many, many foundations at the Linux Foundation.

One of them is the Academy Software Foundation, and it's, you know, motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, right? Mm-Hmm. Most who do the Oscars.

Okay. The people that you wanna thank every year. Yeah, exactly.

Wanna thank and your agent and your mom, you know? Yes. And everyone else.

Yeah, sure. And, and so, um, uh, so, uh, what, you know, look, the, the, there's four members, uh, that are, are part of many, many members. But the four that really stand out to me, because I'm a, a comic book nerd, um, is our friends at Sony Disney, Warner Brothers, Dreamworks.

Um, and, you know, if you spent a little bit of time in Los Angeles, uh, or you have anybody in the Indus industry, you understand that it is cutthroat. These are folks that normally don't get along very well. They're hyper competitive, uh, about screenplays and actors and directors and all this stuff.

Um, but they got together, they formed an open source software foundation where they started working on special effects software. And one of the things that, you know, projects they have is open VDB, which does all the explosions, uh, and, and, and can't wait for dead full wolverine. Uh, you know, coming out, I got, I got tickets for Saturday, coming soon.

No spoilers, I'm not, I'm not saying anything. But they all collaborated on the low end on the infrastructure stuff, and they start competing at the high end intellectual property. That's exactly what our friends at the hyperscalers did.

They all collaborated on Kubernetes and Q Cuttle works the same across all of them. Their hyper, hyper competitive. But they all got together and worked on this common theme because this thing, common theme together.

Because that's not what makes the money, that's not where the differentiation is. Um, you do not go to a Marvel or Warner Brothers DC movie because of the quality of the explosion. You go, because the story characters ba ba ba.

Right? And that's where the real competition is. So, you know, if you are unable to hire a maintainer, you're a small mid-market company and you want to give back to the community, there's many other ways.

Well, one of them is banding together in a foundation with all your friends, either one that's existing or starts your up. And what this does is this puts you and your friends in, in the driver's seat. Now it's gonna be a big driver's seat, and everybody's got a small part of the steering wheel.

But none of us is as smart as of No, none of us is as smart as all of us. Gotcha. Gotcha.

And so, when we all get together, we avoid issues like what we've seen with massive outages because of one company. Um, and we start to see like everybody bands together, and we tie our destiny together, and we're going to succeed, uh, winner take all. It doesn't work if we, you know, base it on one company.

We're in a lot of prob, we're in a lot of trouble. So get together with your friends, uh, hopefully at a, you know, Linux Foundation event. Uh, come see us at CubeCon in Salt Lake City.

I'll buy you a beer or a beverage of your choice. And, um, let's talk, let's see about how we can help your company, uh, get together with other companies that are just like yours and be successful with Cloud Native Tech. I love it.

Hey, Robert, I gotta pull the plug here where we're over time, but as always, as I knew you would, fantastic. Having you on here, really delving into this. Just a quick shout out, uh, ju Con us this year is in Salt Lake City.

It's November. I'll see You. Will you be there?

Oh, you will, You'll be there. Will, Will that be your first Q con? Um, I, you know, I never kiss and tell my friend.

Um, all right. Hey, Robert, thank you so much. Keep up the great work.

Say hello to all of our friends. It's the NCF. We actually have, I think, one or two more on, uh, cloud Native.

Now, for those of you out there, hope you've enjoyed this. We have a full day here of Cloud Native. Now, check out the other sessions.

Some of them may be better than Robert and mine, but I don't think so. But do check them out, Robert. I'll be in touch.

This is Alan Shimel. Enjoy cloud native. Now.