Hart Montgomery, Linux Foundation | Open Source Summit NA 2022

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone. We're back here in Austin.

This is actually gonna be our last interview for the day. I want to introduce you to Heart Montgomery heart is the CTO with the hyperledger foundation and you may may or may not have heard of the hyperledger foundation, but it's hard job to tell you about it. Hey Hart, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me here. It's my pleasure. My pleasure.

So heart. Let's start with the hyperledger foundation. What's it about?

Absolutely. So the hyperledger foundation is the Linux foundation's umbrella Organization for blockchain projects and for projects that are very related to blockchain like blockchain tools or other things that are very closely related to blockchain or ecosystem like identity for instance. So yeah, I know so we work with a lot of the Linux Foundation foundations.

Services we do the open Mainframe project with my friend John Murdock and that has like 26 or something different projects underneath that umbrella. If you will so familiar with the concept, let's let's dig in a little bit though. Give me an idea of what kind of kind of projects are under the hyperledger.

Absolutely. So the main project in sort of the ones that get the most attention are distributed ledgers. So we have fabric which is probably our project that most people are familiar with we have Basu which is exciting because it's very it's it's an ethereum mainnet client and it's connected very ecosystem and we have saw tooth in a Roja we also have a bunch of we have a stack of projects folks done identity.

So we have projects called Indie Aries and Ursa and their focus is a digital identity ecosystem built on top of blockchain. Let's talk about that a little bit. Right?

Sure. So in many ways, I I think you know identity and access control is the killer app for cloud security, right? But we haven't really done a good job.

I mean, yes, it's for cloud security. But it's the same it's your Poppy's identity stuff. Maybe with two-factor iuthentication added in or something.

We haven't You know, I I back in the heady days when Ping Identity first came out and we started talking about Federation and all of these things. I thought we would have made more progress. Around secure digital identities and and you know, frankly not just for people but for every absolutely that needs it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm jaded, but I don't see the progress. So there has actually been a lot of progress made recently.

Okay, and one of the things that our hyperledger identity Community focuses on is something called select to disclosure. Okay, and this is really nice. So the idea is I'll use an example that we bring up all the time with sort of driver's licenses.

So today when you go to the bar, you know, you have to show them your driver's license. They examine it they verify your old enough to drink and you move on now in from a privacy perspective. This can be suboptimal, right?

You know, the the bar tender the bar staff seizure birth that exact birthday see your home address your driver's license number and you know, maybe you're not so worried about you know, a bartender and a bar scanning this but when you're credentials are going across the internet and when they're fully digital, you know, you don't want everyone swiping this well, and if someone's paying that Bart, Going to take a picture of every license. He looks at and that's what's happening on the internet in many cases. So the idea with Selective disclosure is instead of revealing to my whole driver's license.

I can reveal to you some kind of anchor that proves its my driver's license so I can practice I could like give you a picture or something and then I could give you a zero knowledge proof that That I have a driver's license tied to me that says I am over 21 and so you'd probably learn nothing about me other than the fact that you're convinced. That I'm over 21 because some agency you trust is attested to it. So that's the idea behind selective disclosure.

Love it. So how far along is this now? I'm so we have systems that that use this and you know, you can go to our web page and our GitHub and find them and use them today.

We have a number of governments that are building on this platform. Yeah. So Canadian provinces, there's an organization in Germany.

There's an organization in Finland. So, you know, people are really excited about the possibilities of digital identity. so heart the bigger issue of blockchain I almost feel and forgive me.

If you're saying this by almost feel like cryptocurrency might have been the worst thing that ever happened a blockchain in some ways because people you know people have a lot of opinions about crypto and cryptocurrency. It's a scam. It's not a scam.

It'll Set the World free. It won't say, you know. But they don't understand is that the underlying blockchain technology is not Pi in the sky speculative Pirates or anything.

It's solid. It's solid technology. And whatever Bitcoin is worth or if the 3M or who would ever your coin of choices.

doesn't really concern blockchain absolutely. So there's so much what we could do with it then that totally so I like to think of a blockchain as a distributed database with decentralized trust. This is sort of a very abstract primitive, right?

But if you think about it, you know, what is bitcoin it's a distributed database with decentralized trust for money, you know, ethereum is the same thing for for programs, right? And you know, if you just think and in terms of these, you know, very abstract Primitives, you know, you can very quickly see, you know is a blockchain useful for an application or is it not and unfortunately, we have seen a lot of people build centralized applications or even on top of blockchain or even centralized blockchains which you know, sort of defeats the purpose right face of what it's supposed to do. It's just less efficient than using a centralized database in many cases and you know, the blockchain is just there for the hype.

But you know that sort of masks the fact that you know this. distributed database with decentralized trust is a primitive you want in many real-world applications that deliver value and you know, we've seen it from you know, supply chain to finance as I mentioned before identity, you know, these are all general areas where A group of people or entities want to maintain an information store and they can't agree on who should be the root of trust for all of this. So great.

I'm going to ask you a hard question. Sure. I need yarn is to answer.

Do you think blockchain has gone mainstream yet is it's still ahead of it. I think it I'm going to sort of sidestep that and okay. I'm gonna it's hard.

I'm gonna say, you know, it depends on what you mean by mainstream. So certainly people know about what blockchain is even if they don't have a deep technical understanding of it. So in that sense, it's gone mainstream, but in some sense is it really hasn't like one of the big applications of you know, this kind of distributed and decentralized technology or things like Central Bank digital currencies and we haven't seen you know, widespread adoption there, you know, even though it you know, seems like it should be an excellent application.

Obviously, you know Bankers are extremely conservative. So we we don't expect anything to go quickly and they want to be, you know, extremely convinced that you know, the solution works and it's secure and everything's gonna go right. So from that perspective, you know, I don't think it's gotten history.

No, you know, it's surprises me with that though. When you look at like Technologies the finance the financial vertical is adopted. devops some of the things around security There's so much pressure on them to do more faster to to give these give their customers what they want at their fingertips instantly.

to do it securely Above All Else think that they would have put the Cycles in. To to trust blockchain for lack of a better word right to get behind this. Absolutely.

I mean, I think a lot of traditional finance companies are discovering that they're going to have to become more or less tech companies to succeed absolutely modern world. And you know, this is this is difficult. Right?

It's very difficult to sort of change your company from a financial company to to a tech company and I think you know, this is one of the reasons why we're seeing some of the you know delay in financial adoption because a lot of these companies don't have hordes of You know. Tech folk deeply experienced software Engineers who can just you know, and they can't you know sort of it's hard to spin up a huge debt. No doubt, but you know what?

I remember meeting with the folks at City. It was actually called City bank, then it wasn't even City 2005 2006. This was around patch management.

vulnerabilities Daddy's sprawling infrastructure of people they have what they know. They know it's the new stuff that often takes them. you know while they get their head wrapped around but once So it's very much a me too industry when someone else does it they all want to hop the bandwagon right because they're afraid to get left behind.

And that they'll have an offering not as good as their competitor and then secondly. It just until they kind of internalize it it's not the technical folk that have to be convinced. It's the managers.

It's the decision makers and that takes time. Absolutely I before I worked for the Linux Foundation. I worked in a in a company where we're parts of the company had a lot of you know open source knowledge, but but others didn't you know, and it was that open source snobbery, right?

It's open source. Oh, yeah. Yeah and just Getting people to you know to adopt new technology some of my great co-workers and I you know had it was it was an uphill battle.

But you know, we had to say hey, this is the future, you know, we need to use blockchain, you know, we need to use open source. I you know, just like open sources now in 98% of organizations. I assume it's gonna be too we got a bang out of here, but I wanted to let our folks know if they want to get more information about the group.

Maybe they want to get up or maybe they just want to learn a little bit about more about blockchain. Where can they go? org, we have links to our Discord to our communities and like everything else in the Linux Foundation.

We're completely open organization. You can show up you can join meetings. You can join our Discord you can sign up for our email list.

So it's very easy to get started. org. That's correct.

Love it. Hey, thanks for stopping by absolutely pleasure meeting you. Good luck.

Thank you so much. Hey, we're wrapping up here in Oregon in Austin. I said August Austin Linux Foundation open source, Summit.

We hope you've enjoyed the coverage. Bye.