OpenELA Source Code and Linux Distributions – Alan Clark, SUSE

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Alan Clark, who's a director in the office of the CTO for suse, and we're talking about the arrival of open ELA and what it means to IT folks.

Alan, welcome to the show. Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here.

You guys have been working on this kind of open collaborative approach to Lennox distributions and some direct response to some of the changes we've seen recently in, uh, licensing of other distributions. But walk us through what's going on here and what is the impact to the IT organizations and what are they supposed to be doing about all of this? Okay, that's a very good question.

So IT departments have been concerned for some time. Um, so your, your point is, is, uh, very insightful. Um, in that, uh, red Hat over the years has built up a, uh, enterprise level, uh, standard, right?

And then over the past couple years, they've been making some announcements that have concerned folks, IT folks in particular, um, and organizations and even at a, an industry level in, uh, vertical levels. And as such, they've become very concerned. And this latest announcement they, they made back in, uh, August timeframe, July, August, really set people on to have a big concern about what's the future, what's it going to be like?

And we've seen these things happen in the past and, uh, with other instances and, uh, it's even occurring in, in other cases, uh, today. And typically what happens is either that standard just kinda, this separates or it becomes very fragmented as others try to jump in and fill in the holes. Or another standard bearer comes, comes to fruition and helps support that standard going forward.

And that's what you're seeing happen here today with open ELA, um, particularly, you know, as, as far as open source. So back in August we announced the fact that, uh, we had the intent to do this. So Susa, Oracle and CIQ got together and says, you know what?

We need to provide some assurance to these folks, uh, going forward. Our customers, their customers and just community members in general, were very concerned about what the future looked like. And so, uh, in back in August, we announced, Hey, we're going to take this standard forward, ensure that the source code is available, we're gonna follow the open source tenants and, um, uh, um, provide transparency, build a community around this.

And, um, so back then in August, what we announced was an intent to do so. And today or yesterday, what we announced is that we are fulfilling that promise. Uh, and the announcement was that, hey, we have the code available now.

Uh, we've built a neutral, uh, corporate entity, uh, to govern this so that it's not owned by any single company. And that, uh, we have a technical committee in place, uh, so that the community can work together and, and rally around this code base and keep it going forward. So if I'm an IT organization today, and I don't have access to the source code, does it make it harder for me to switch vendors over time or to add a different, so really the focus here should, you should recognize is that what we're producing here is the source code.

So open ELA is not going to be yet another distro out there. Um, so SUSE has Liberty, Oracle has, uh, Oracle Linux, CIQ has Rocky, and there's a whole bunch of others that are planning to come and join us. The intent here is that we're collaborating together to build that source.

So as an IT person is, uh, if I'm after the binaries and, and support through through, uh, a, a SUSE or an Oracle or a Rocky, you'll still continue to go to there. Uh, what we're doing is collaborating together on, on that source. And this is going to pre help prevent the, uh, the market from fragmenting.

So from the IT perspective, this provides an assurance that, okay, I've got, I've got a, uh, a path going forward. Um, it's not gonna fragment, uh, ISVs are gonna be able to continue to build towards that same, uh, code base, um, and deliver. And, and I have an assurance of going forward.

So really for an IT pers perspective, it's about an assurance that this is going to be available going forward. Are multiple companies gonna wind up contributing to some sort of common code base? And will that accelerate innovation as we go forward?

It a, it actually will. Yes. So our intent is to stay, we've got two things going on here.

Our mainstream intent is to stay one-to-one compatible, um, with RL going forward. And secondly, uh, provide the opportunity for folks to contribute. And we already have some contributions coming.

We do not want to replace upstreams, right? So our encouragement is, if if you have a patch or an idea, please contribute that to the upstream sources, right? We do not want to replace those.

We do not want to subvert those. We want to work with them. So if you've got a patch for the Linux kernel, put it in the Lenox kernel.

If it fits and it's pertinent, the the technical steering committee will help you work and, and contribute that out into open ELA open. We've heard a lot of concerns lately about just changes to licensing terms related to open source projects and yeah. Um, sometimes that affects, uh, vendors only other times it does trickle down to the IT organizations.

A lot of the conversation seems to be about can we ensure the financial stability of the organizations that are launching open source projects? But what's your sense of what is the health of the open source community and how should I be thinking about it these days? 'cause it does seem like there's a lot of nuances in the licensing terms to work through.

Well, this, this was my, going back to my point earlier, the open source communities are healthy. Um, if you follow the open source tenants, what you'll find is one of those says that you shouldn't have, uh, a single company as a source, right? Um, the health of open source is when you have multiple companies collaborating together.

And that's why, uh, there was more than one company coming together to form open ELA. And, uh, we fully, uh, invite and very much want other, uh, downstream distros to come and join us and ISDs and, and users as well. So open source is live alive and well and growing.

Uh, I've, I was at a conference, uh, last week, uh, where they were showing statistics that, uh, 97 or nine over 90% of, uh, products companies are deploying contain open source. So it's being used everywhere. Are people contributing enough to open source projects?

There's been a lot of noise in the system about usage of open source by large enterprises and not giving back enough. And I know, I think they think that they paid for it when they signed up for some sort of commercial distribution, but, um, do we need more input from the end user community as a whole? We do.

Uh, we very much cherish that. Um, I'm involved in, in several projects, not just open ELA and, uh, the users, uh, operators, uh, um, are very much wanted to be involved to help guide us towards the future, right? What are their needs?

What are the use cases? Uh, how are they using, what are they not using, right? All of those, those keys are, are very much wanted and needed in the open source communities.

And, and just as a side note from from S'S perspective, and I know our, our partners in this effort do the same thing. Um, we also take the, the input that we get through our customers, right, that are, that are, we're supporting to our services, we feed that back into the community. So even if, uh, an IT department is not directly involved in open source, we take their input and feed that back into the open source communities where we are involved.

So their input is heard directly and indirectly. There are a lot of consortiums in the open source space, so mm-Hmm. Are they gonna play a role in this or is this gonna be an independent effort from them?

Or how will they kind of contribute or collaborate? Yeah, so there are a lot of consortiums. Um, and again, as I mentioned, I I contribute to, to several, um, and both in the Lennox Foundation, eclipse and, and others.

And that's very common, um, that we all do that and that, that, uh, creates this cross association, um, and helps, uh, for us to work together, uh, more efficiently and, and communicate better. So it happens today already. Is there any differentiated value to be had at the operating system level anymore, or is just fundamentally a, an enabling technology at this point?

So it should just be open source for all. 'cause the value and the commitment is much higher up the stack. Yeah.

The more there is more attention paid up the stack, but at the same time, there's a lot of new innovation that's actually happening down at the Linux operating system at the kernel. Uh, we're, we're talking a lot today about distributed computing. It seems like we, we go around of consolidation and then we distribute it back out.

Um, so we talk about that in terms of edge computing, right? And pushing AI constructs out to the edge, and that takes a very smart operating system to do that, right? And so we're building operating systems to fit the very small devices clear out on the far edge to the smart devices with intelligence to, to, um, handle, uh, transactions in, in real time, right?

So, uh, and this is getting adopted by industries like retail and finance and so forth, you know, all the way up to the supercomputers. So you could say, well, we're done, but the actuality is no, we haven't even begun. Um, there's so much happening in the world today and expectations from our users, right?

We're expecting real time results. Uh, when we go into a store nowadays, or shop online or whatever, we're expecting things to happen in real time that requires changes and updates clear down to the OSS level. Speaking of that idea, historically at least we have watched innovations start at layers three through seven, and then they eventually work their way down to get embedded into the core operating systems and into the processors.

Is that fundamental approach to the way computing works changed, or is that just gonna continue? And that's how the world is, and that's why the operating system's always gonna be relevant. So it, it, we keep thinking we get it containerized or compartmentalized.

Uh, we've done a lot, I've seen a lot of work happen in the industry around modularization. Once that that has done is enable us to speed up the innovation. Um, and so we can make changes lower without affecting the full stack like it used to, right?

Because it used to be so monolithic, you change something at layer two and it had affected all the way up. Nowadays we've done much better job in modularization and isolation such that they don't impact them as much, um, which frees us up to do more and exciting things. So, I mean, clear down with the networking layers and, and interprocess communications and so forth, there's a lot of exciting work going on.

So ultimately, what's your best advice to IT organizations as they kind of a ponder the future of operating systems? B uh, specifically, you know, things like open ELA and these licensing changes. Do I need an office of the open source community project manager, or how should I be thinking about this?

Uh, you should be definitely keeping an eye on what's on the innovation that's happening in open source. Uh, 'cause many of the new constructs that are in the news today are all happening in open source. And, um, so open source is enabling innovation to happen very quickly.

So yeah, they do definitely wanna keep an eye on that. Uh, some choose to, um, like we mentioned before, participate in open source through a, uh, a vendor like SUSE or CIQ or Oracle. Others like to participate directly.

Um, and so it kind of just depends on their flavor, um, of how they want to participate, whether they should have, uh, the, the, the industry term as an hospital, right? That deals with open source and, uh, and the constructs and how to work with communities and so forth. Whether they need something like that or whether they work with a, a vendor, uh, that, that is immersed in open source is kind of their choice.

All right, folks, while you heard it here, there's a lot of options when it comes to open source and the devil's in the detail. You wanna read the fine print till then? We'll see you next time.