The Economic Crisis in Open Source | TSG Ep. 931

Hey, folks, is there an open source economic crisis? We're about to find out. You're watching Techron.

Hey, folks, we're back and we've got an awesome lineup. Again, talking about wealth. Some of the most interesting things that have happened in the land of app dev are all happening this week.

And we're gonna get started with this open letter from not 1, 2, 3, but four or five different open source associations, consortiums, whatever you want to talk, call them, complaining about the fact that they're paying for infrastructure that people are using within their software development life cycles, especially the package managers. Uh, and they're bearing the cost for all of that, and nobody seems to be helping them out, and it's costing tens of millions of dollars. And they're putting everybody on notice that either somebody has to help them fund this, or they're gonna start throttling access to those APIs.

Grima, I know you've been monitoring this whole space, but, um, what's your assessment of what's going on here? Because they seem to be pointing to large enterprises specifically and saying that you're abusing the privilege. I think, uh, I'll start from the basic and the fundamental, uh, shift, and I wrote a, a article on this as well, new era of open source, but I mean, uh, going back to the basics, open source represents a paradigm shift, right?

So collaboration, transparency, community driven, uh, innovation, our key to this, uh, movement. But, uh, often open source is, uh, considered to be like access to free code, which is not the case, right? So open source, uh, describes that the software has to have the permission to use copy distribute, and either, uh, either to modify it or from a commercial standpoint, or it has to be free, right?

So there are license implications, obligations to follow, and there are definitions laid out by open source, uh, initiatives like open source, uh, software, for example. And I'm quite passionate about this space because if you see, uh, DevOps has been, um, the front runners to create, uh, innovative solutions in open source, uh, like for example, OpenTelemetry or Argo, uh, it's kind of contributing, uh, to a certain extent. Uh, a lot of innovative solutions which are coming to DevOps.

Now, the difficulty which, uh, you referred in the article and the, these people who have been pointing out that there is not enough funding, uh, I had also pointed this out in my blog that, you know, why it is arising is that there is lack of centralized tracking. 15 billion, but the demand side is around, uh, $8 trillion, but there is no central tracking for it, right? And that's the reason why you see a lot of these open source initiatives are not well funded.

Uh, there was another report which, uh, uh, I will call it state of open source report, which also highlights some of the operational pain points. I mean, it's great to have an open source initiative, but they struggle to maintain, uh, security, for example. There are not enough maintainers for the open source capability, technical support, for example.

There are gaps in it. Um, there are also lack of skill, experience, and proficiency in this area. So I, I think all in all, um, what it reflects is, you know, we are at a pivotal point where open source, uh, community, uh, drivers need to think about, uh, newer business models.

You know, how we ensure that we get enough funded, uh, you know, projects and the funding has to flow in the right direction. Uh, foundations like clinics, foundation, uh, CNCF, uh, CDF, they have done a great job, right, to protect some of the innovation and bring some funding to the, the space. But I think it's not enough.

It's also like one other factor. I I can go on and on on this topic, but one other factor, which I also see is single vendor driven open source initiatives, I think, um, that needs to be thought through well, because, you know, it's, it's evident that, you know, those open source initiatives die down in the middle. And, uh, there is a specific commercialization aspect from the beginning or the inception stages.

So what we see, uh, for example, with Terraform or Elasticsearch, these are like great examples, just like they now, these projects have been pivoting to a different, uh, business license. And, uh, this is also reflective of the fact that open source community leaders have to come together to see what other funding models are available, what kind of business model we have to pivot to, to ensure that this whole, uh, open source innovation remains sustainable and well funded. And I know that, Robert, you come from that, uh, space.

So maybe you also shared some of your thoughts on this topic. Oh, for sure. That's, that's why I changed the title.

Chopper of Wood and Carrier of Water. You know, it's what we do in open source, right? It's based on the effort that you put in is the impact that you're having on the project.

Um, and really the most thing, the, the thing that's valued the most in open source communities is contributions. What this letter is calling out is that some companies aren't contributing. They're benefiting from this, um, and expecting not-for-profit organizations to pick up the slack while they make money off of it.

And so this is a classic tragedy of the Collins problem here. So is as the use of Kubernetes increases, um, certainly every single one of those Kubernetes installations has to pull down containers. And where are those containers at?

Um, and who is hosting those? org, um, petabytes, um, the, as the, uh, that project becomes more and more popular, you would expect that if it was a private company, they would make more re revenue. Uh, so as EKS goes up in, uh, uh, you know, popularity, Amazon makes more money.

Oh, it works out. So yes, they're incurring more network storage, compute costs, but they're making more money off of it. Not-for-profit foundations that host these projects that pay for the CI/CD hosting infrastructure, they don't make more money.

And so eventually what happens is it's not sustainable. And guess what? All the companies that depend on that, and we're not just talking about technology companies, we're talking about banks, insurance companies, retailers, they should be very concerned about this.

Uh, especially if they're using services that depend on this open source. If they're concerned about these things being available and their business is dependent upon it, and they're paying a service provider to run this, I would expect that they, well, I would hope that they would demand from the service provider that they support these things because it is part of their value chain. It's just good business to, to support this.

And unfortunately, with the tragedy of the Commons, uh, a lot of large companies that are making plenty of money off this say, eh, somebody else will do it. So do we not know who's using this stuff? And I get that there's an issue here, but I'm not quite clear that an open letter was the way to go with this.

Or could I not just call up, you know, the CIO of some of these organizations and say, you know, you guys, you know, maybe I'll send them in a little note. It will say, you know, dear, CIO freeloader, you know, you're causing me issues. This is all gonna be, It said a little nicer than that, Mike, You know, but Robert, I mean, you're right.

I mean, this is just like a digital common problem at scale. And you and Mike is exactly right about this freeloader aspect. Like, they're like, surveys done on this.

Like, what is it? But I'm almost a hundred percent, like up to 97% of the users at open Source really don't give anything back, whether it's financially code, documentation, bug reports, I mean, it's, and, but addressing it in a letter, my eyes kind of glazed over at these, these attempts, like in terms of any type of consortium or initiative, you almost have to go directly to the, to the, you have to go directly to the offenders, and you say, look, you, you need to change your, your approach. But, Oh, I, I agree.

org, you know, with, with, you know, uh, and, and heck, I remember, um, a year and a half ago, Fastly making o Neil Dash over at Fastly made a big announcement about, uh, 40 million a year, um, to open source projects, uh, with their Fast Forward program, and they really focused on the Linux Foundation. So Colonel and CNCF Jenkins, um, certainly our friends over at Node, uh, open js. So, you know, what's missing from this is, I agree with you in an open letter, is is, is like a, a, to steal a line from, from Rick and Morty.

It's like, you know, a, a a a temper tantrum to say you're quitting Twitter. Um, it's, it's just like, okay, great. Yeah, do that.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and so what I would, oh, go ahead, Gina.

The Problem on this, like, there are this, this is twofold, right? So the funding pipeline, which we are talking about, right? So open letter is only a motivation to say that we are in trouble, right?

But there is another thing which we should not overlook, is the payback models. Why we should concentrate on both of them is it'll trigger a lot of open washing. It'll trigger a lot of fleet, uh, capitalism in the open source space, which we have seen with Terraforms of the world and elastic searches of the world.

So I, I believe that, you know, I mean, I, uh, fully believe that these people have tried to approach enterprises and try to kind of trigger negotiations on how, uh, they can get the funding pipeline healthy, healthier. But at the end of the day, it's a, it's a basic issue of, you know, we cannot sustain or survive with the same models, which were defined in 1980s. Uh, we are now having AI triggers, for example, the current contributors, like, how would you stop ai, uh, native contributions to these open source projects, right?

Yeah. We have to fill the security gaps. We, we have a lot more, like 95% of your code base, uh, according to a black duck survey is open source.

So there is a fundamental issue. The nineties low. All right, Tom, Tom, How far do we go with this?

So let's assume that, uh, there has been some sort of communication and it's been roundly ignored. Do these associations then engage in some form of public shaming to get everybody in line? I mean, how far do we go?

Because, you know, other people are suffering because of, you might argue, gluttony. Well, I, I think that you are right. These people probably did already reach out to the CIOs of some of the worst defenders.

And and we've covered this a few times on the rundown, where companies have come out and said, you know, Hey, Amazon, do you realize how much of our money that you're stealing every month by, uh, using our open source database in your product and basically causing backend hits on our servers? And, and there's a, you are, right? There's a point where you get to where you have to just name and shame, right?

And, and I think though, the problem we're gonna run into is that most of the naming and shaming is gonna be the same eight or nine or 10 companies that have, you know, huge workloads that they've built off of this stuff. And, and in order to illustrate that perfectly, I'm going to steal this meme from the internet that has copyright images in it, and I'm just gonna broadcast it everywhere. Oh, what do you mean that I have to pay for that image?

Oh, I, I don't understand licensing. I don't know how it works. Why, why are you holding me accountable for something that I had no clue about?

And that's kind of the game that they're playing, right? Well, I, I was just using it for a project. I, I didn't realize that I had to pay if it was a commercial entity.

What do you mean by commercial entity? I mean, yeah, I make money off of your software, but not me. 'cause I'm just, I'm a small little mom and pop bookstore on the internet.

And that's the, where you're getting into the, the trying to slice that, that pie really thin to get what you want. Because to, to Gramma's point, we're using ideas from the nineties in the eighties of collaborative development and kind of this, um, for lack of a better term, touchy-feely development style, uh, in a world of cutthroat capitalism where if I can take a free piece of software and make money off of it, then my profit margin is infinite. And that's what developer or that, not developers, developers hate that, but shareholders love it.

And that's what they want, right? Is they want to build the biggest, most massive empire off of the cheapest, freely available things that they can find, and they'll solve that problem later. How many times have we heard that, oh, this is just a temporary fix.

We'll, we'll, we'll make something better later. They, they won't, they'll keep using this until they absolutely have to stop. And the way to do that, unfortunately, for open source developers is to play hardball and say, okay, cool, we're cutting you off.

So, yeah, I suspect what you're saying, oh, Go ahead, Tom. I'm Sorry. Just wanted to respond to that, to the project.

Yeah, so I suspect that they, that they probably did, as you said, Tom, they went through back channels and probably didn't have much, much luck. So they're escalating it up to a letter. And then beyond that though, how, how, what do you do?

Like, how do you affect change from these bad habits that have been lingering for years? You, You literally have to cut them off publicly. You have to come right out and say, okay, you are not allowed to use this anymore.

And if you do, you have breached the terms of the license and we will sue you. Now, if an open source project can't afford to keep the lights on, I don't think they can afford lawyers. However, there are luckily, a lot of lawyers out there that would love to work for one of these projects, um, and kind of make a name as the people who brought down Amazon or something along those lines.

But no, you're, you, you're gonna have to play hardball and all. You're, I was thinking it's gonna legal get one developer to lose. Yeah, if Amazon, Uh, not more.

Like, there are a few more, uh, steps which we can take. And I'm a open source advocate, and I'm, I don't go that strong as Tom is advocating for, but I think we, uh, I think the central problem is that there is no central tracking for all this, right? I mean, we'll have to get serious about that.

The second thing I also would advocate for is start to look into what works for today's era, right? What licensing, licensing models like this late, uh, late shift to, you know, commercial models, why is it happening? It, is it a trigger?

It's, is it saying something to you? Because like open source help desk, uh, open source services open, like be more creative in, you know, uh, thinking through how you can solve these problems with new capacity, new service models, new initiatives, new services, right? And these foundations need to think through, like hosting a project in their capacity and space is not sufficient.

They need to also be creative in building that funding pipeline with, uh, the enterprises and have a dialogue of co-creation with these guys. I will tell you, it's all gonna break much sooner than you think. So let's think this through for a minute.

For every developer, there's gonna be 10 AI agents that are essentially 10 more developers paying, banging on these platforms, trying to pull down containers and whatever else it is. So I don't think any of these associations are set up to, uh, provide that level of capacity. So it's probably only a matter of months now before some of these projects just keel over and break.

So that'll force the issue. No, Well, they, they rely on the service providers, um, CDNs cloud to, to host, um, these releases. And, and that's the real issue here, that as usage goes up, the, the foundation's revenue doesn't go up.

So all the money is going back to these companies, which are ironically, or maybe not, ironically, making a lot of money off these, these things. Now, I will say this, there are a large number of these big companies that are supporting this, but not in a holistic way. They are supporting projects that they believe are important to their company.

So understand this, AWS is a huge supporter of container D. Um, maintainer works at A WSS and only works on container D not any AWS stuff. Um, AWS also donates millions and millions to CNCF.

So does Google, um, Microsoft, Oracle. It's the other things, it's the other things that are, are, are crucial to this infrastructure that are neglected. Um, you know, it, it's, I don't think people understand that node is petabytes of data.

It's really expensive, and thank God vastly stepped up for that. But what about that long tail? Um, we need to get a holistic approach for this, and I would argue that the foundations need to get better at communicating what's in it for me, the, with them for the provider.

If you give us support and credits, we are gonna tell the world that this open source project uses you. And of course, you know, the sales people that big IT company, when they run up against the big bank, the big insurance company, and they question scalability, that company, that salesperson could say, well, you know, we help out this little open source project called, you know, the Linux kernel. I think we can handle you.

Um, they need to weave that story into help the company make more revenue. And with marketing, I don't think they're doing that. And, and that's an opportunity for our friends that signed that open letter to kind of lean in on that.

All right, folks, we can go on forever about this, but I'm gonna move on to the next topic. Just in one point, Hey, foundations are mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. Now we'll see how it all plays up.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Techron Group. Hey, folks, we're back and continuing our conversation about interesting open source technologies. 0 is finally complete.

It's been worked on now for, I don't know, I feel like maybe a year or two. It's hard to keep track of these things, but web assembly, the theory of the promise at least, is that there is a file format that we're gonna be able to use so that our software as we build it, can run anywhere. You remember the promise of Java.

Well, you know, wasm is trying to like, bring that whole notion back, and we're gonna write once and run it anywhere. At least that's the theory. And there's a consortium called, uh, byte International that kind of heads up the, I guess, the development side of wasm.

And then we've seen the Cloud Native Computing Foundation kind of step up to handle more of the runtime environments for wasm. And these things are supposed to be coming together in some interesting way that will drive some level of innovation. 0, we finally got a version that works, And, and, and we, you're right, it is, it has taken a long time to get these, uh, features and new releases out.

Um, and, you know, but remember, this is free. Uh, so nobody's paying for it. Uh, uh, well, rather we aren't paying for it.

Somebody is. Um, and, uh, but it takes time to do this. You know, it, it, remember how long it took to get data persistence in Kubernetes.

Uh, we, we went through several paths, uh, to, to get there. This release is really boring and necessary. This release has got a lot of stuff dealing with memory and garbage collection, and these are the blockers for greater adoption.

Um, and, and that's what's exciting about this. Um, you know, um, you know, Gima is certainly far more of an expert about this than I am, but what I see here is that they're coming out prior to CubeCon, um, and, and being able to say, Hey, look, we've got a release out. It, it's, it's a major release.

It starts with a three. And, and so, um, you know, they're coming out and saying, we have solved a lot of the blockers to adoption, and that's gonna be really exciting. Now, I don't think any of these features are, are, are, there's going to be issues with one, two, maybe all of 'em.

But now that they're released, the companies that are dependent upon this stuff, and you're choosing Wasm as a platform for running cloud native at the edge, great, now they get to start looking at it and really pushing it. This is a good thing. The more opportunities we have to take this huge body of open source and cloud native and get it to work in other places.

We did it for web services, we did it for GPU workloads, now we're doing the edge. This is a very positive thing. And yes, it took a long time, Mike, And well, we'll come back to that issue in a minute, but I just want to get Garima's opinion on this.

One particular thing is, you know, what I heard from developers all the time is that they like this idea, but every time they put their hands on it, they come away with one impression. It's frigging hard. And we don't have really a good set of tools for the developers to go make this, you know, dream a reality just yet.

So do we need, you know, a whole nother rev of tools here for the developers to make this work? Yeah, I think it's very interesting times, uh, now and we are talking about this AI browser race and all that, right? So it all boils down to the fact that we will see a lot of action in the edge space, and we have to go cloud native at the edge.

I'll articulate a few use cases for you just to kind of, uh, uh, for the viewers to understand why we are talking about this and why this is, uh, becoming extremely important in the age of ai. So for example, who is, who would be the potential users for web assembly? Um, kind of applications would be like e-commerce platforms.

0 release because it enhances user experience. You know, if you think about, uh, uh, 3D configurators for example, or realtime image editors, uh, that it makes it more easier for e-commerce platform to adopt to that edge native capacity, right? Then we also see a lot of like sensors and sensor based use cases for, uh, you know, get to the kind of real life.

There's another great example, which I will use is, uh, a web assembly, uh, in online ID platforms. If you see replicate, for example, if you have used it or Code Sandbox, these are great use cases where you can run compilers and interpreters in the browser, right? So why this whole, uh, you know, the suite of features are important is that, uh, they have enhanced language support, right?

And they also have, uh, done some performance optimization as, uh, Robert was speaking about the various, uh, performance enhancements, uh, regarding, uh, 64 bit addressing, for example, uh, memory space, uh, and so on and so forth. So I think it creates, uh, a lot of, uh, more capacity for the web ecosystem and the edge native computing itself, uh, which was resource constrained, uh, from the beginning, right? Um, there are other, uh, aspects of this release, which are also addressing some kind of, uh, service serverless challenges in the past, and they have, uh, some, uh, advocate for some potential solutions, uh, in this release.

So that is also a great start to kind of, you know, watch out for, All right, Tom, um, going back to what I was talking about on timing with Robert, uh, I get that this is a major undertaking and it has a lot of promise, but it has taken a long time, and I have a conspiracy theory that says that maybe, you know, we're just underfunding the effort required here because it's so disruptive, and a lot of players are like, yeah, we don't wanna rush this one because it's gonna change a lot of, uh, you know, who's the dominant players of what, I think you're right, but maybe not malice, just lack of thought about it, right? Uh, maybe they're hoping, well, it's complex, people don't want to implement it because they don't know how to do it. And my way is easier, even if it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, and we'll kick the can down the road a little bit further.

Uh, I would rather them take the extra time, right? How many times have we seen a standard get rushed out the door, or, uh, my favorite analog to this is things like operating systems, right? Uh, how many times have you heard from people, oh, well, there was nothing in that release of insert operating system here, uh, that really wowed me.

So I I I, I, I don't, I think they've lost the plot, right? Like, there's nothing magical about this anymore. Um, I hear that literally every quarter when there's new release of an OS or every year when there's new release of a mobile device.

And then going back to what Robert said earlier, yeah, sometimes what you have to do is you have to have the release that worries about mundane things like garbage collection or ensuring that when you install it on a certain model of edge router, that it's not gonna make it catch on fire and burn down a base station. Uh, you have to do those things because that's how you make it a stable, reliable platform. It's like Debbie and, uh, releases.

They're, they're built on old packaging because it works. We've proven that it works, and I think that the, the companies that are kind of positioning themselves as alternatives to the standard are wanting to capture the early adopters. They're wanting to get people to jump out there and use their platform and write code that's more sticky to their platform instead of doing something that's more standardized, like using wasm.

So I, I would hope that by taking the slow road, eventually this will emerge as the dominant way to do it, because it's the way that you can do it that doesn't require you to refactor your code every three months, and it's not going to cause massive problems with devices that adhere strongly to the standards. All right, Robert, is Tom right? Simple inertia, or is there something else at work here?

No, he, he nailed it. He, he paraphrased the quote that Miyamoto never said, which was a delayed game is eventually good, but a rush game is forever bad. Uh, you know, it, it's, you're, it, this takes time.

And, and, and Tom, I agree completely. Look, you're dealing with open source, you're dealing with a lot of different stakeholders, and they do it out in the open. You know, this isn't a small Tiger team that is releasing, um, you know, the first version of the iPhone, uh, and get it out.

Um, it, it, it, and, and remember that didn't even have an app store. Um, so, uh, you know, and, and had that weird connector, strange, um, but look, it, this takes time, and I really appreciate that they're focusing on boring infrastructure, memory, languages, you know, that sort of stuff, because those are the things that are making it difficult to adopt, adopt their bet is that the tooling around that will get there. Our friends that make tooling for, uh, containers, um, you know, we would hope that, uh, our friends over at maybe vs code IntelliJ Eclipse would, would start building.

Uh, and they already have this, but better, uh, tooling to use wasm. Our CI/CD friends would start working on this. They, they've got a lot of great experience with Docker deploying containers.

Let's apply this to Wasm. I Believe you can use Docker desktop to build wasm apps. And so they've definitely seen perfect Example of the tool vendors catching up.

There You go. Yeah, there is one more aspect to it is that this space is also evolving, right? I mean, if you think about devices or backend systems or, uh, language support, all this is kind of evolving at, at a great pace.

And that is also a challenge for this kind of capability, which looks at portability, interoperability, performance issues, and engineer is not, uh, you know, easy to kind of deploy, right? So it has its own nuances and it, it takes time to kind of ensure that everything is, uh, safely portable and interoperable. All right, let me, let me test a polling here of one.

Jon Swartz, you sit out in the valley, you, you hear, you talk to these companies all day long. Anybody out there like even knows how to spell Wasm? I mean, you hear anybody talking about Wasm?

No. Zero. Um, but my takeaway from this is that although this might on the surface seem like some sort of incremental announcement, I think at the courts, pretty profound.

I mean, and I, it's, it's basically this is a platform that's gonna support high level programming languages and allow for larger applications. I mean, that's kind of significance, but I guess here, I'm in New York right now, but saying here, euphemistically in the valley, it's all about, it's pretty superficial, varnished, shiny objects, AI agents. That's, that's, that's the focus and the obsession, the stuff below the, uh, beneath the weeds or the, the, the, the mechanisms that make things happen, they're almost secondary.

It's all about the surface. All right, well, folks, I'm gonna leave it there, but I would remind everybody that if you wanna learn more about Wasm, do come to CubeCon. It's in Atlanta in November, and that's where a lot of these conversations will be taking place in like most revolutions, I think they started a long time before anybody actually recognized that they were happening.

And I think this is the example thereof. But meanwhile, we're gonna be committed to shining the light on Waza more and more because, well, we think it's a good idea, and we'll see where it goes from there. We'll be back in a minute.

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Hey folks, we're back. And the third block deals with an announcement that was led by Snowflake and a bunch of its partners for a new specification for a, uh, semantic model interchange format. And the idea here is that, and I'm, let me explain what semantic models are.

First is a lot of organizations will take the terminology that they use to drive their business, or what the terminology that drives their vertical industry and put it into something that feels like a semantic model so that they can simplify interoperability. And if you have this in place, it also makes it easier to move from one application environment to another. Now, the number of companies that have one of these is probably not that large, but more and more folks are thinking about building these things in the age of AI because they're gonna be needed to drive a lot of these AI agents, um, John, you know, snowflake and all these data management companies, are they the folks that are really gonna be supplying the, uh, picks and shovels that make all the money in this AI gold rush?

'cause it sure seems that way. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right.

That's what makes them so significant. Um, and that's what I, I think makes them a pillar in a sense, like the Switzerland of the development. So yes, they are a key provider and they have created a niche for themselves like a few other companies have, um, where they work with everyone rather than work against someone over for a small piece of turf or some sort of developing, developing part of the, of the ecosystem.

So, yes, absolutely. Although, um, I was gonna ask you this, Mike, we've been talking in the previous segment about initiatives and letters. Do you think there's a lot of hef behind this one given the players?

I think that the players are still relatively small. I don't see a lot of snowflakes direct competitors are signing up for this just yet, but they are interested in having a chat with one of the consortiums about taking over the governance for this thing. And Robert, it seems to me, whenever these initiatives get started, those consortiums play a big role in getting the momentum going and the world.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you know, if, if it's just one company, if it's just one company that's a steward of a thing, open source project standards, it makes the other people in that space nervous.

They're concerned that that individual company has too much power. So when you place that company, instead of owning everything and controlling everything, puts it into a place where others can provide input, that actually increases the surface Area. And so it, it's basically, we're going to turn this over to a neutral third party that is gonna oversee this and make sure that we all follow the rules that we agree upon.

And so we're all gonna collaborate on this thing, and then we're gonna go and do our own thing to make money off of it. It actually is the weight is the best way that we have, uh, there's always areas for improvement, but currently it's the best way that we have to collaborate and well encourage collaboration and bring people in and lower risk for those other companies to invest their time and money. Yeah, there's not a lot of critics available, uh, around this, uh, announcement yet, but I opened this forum for some critical comments, and I think Robert has pointed out a very good point.

Like, you know, when a competitor or a specific company dominates to, you know, build up a standard, it's no longer a standard, right? So it'll be very, very interesting to see how this translate into a third party vendor neutral consortium based, you know, movement, uh, adoption as well is also something which I am looking forward for, like how companies applications, you know, suite of enterprises would adopt to this kind of, you know, open standard is another area, gray area as is today and implementation, like how the implementation will happen. Like this is all fancy, like looks good on paper, but implementation is the real meat of the conversation.

So you've got to have real people who can do the job for you. So you will have to have, you'll, uh, have to go beyond a founder driven roadmap to a community driven roadmap for this. Mm-hmm.

Tom, I have a pet theory and it goes something like this and I'll grant you, it's another conspiracy. But, um, in the rush to support AI agents, and we need to make data accessible to these things, we have seen movements to standards like this one. And I'll add in, uh, MCP and A to a protocols and all those things.

But an interesting event might occur on the back end of all of this. We're gonna turn all these data platforms that we've found ourselves locked in, into over the years. We'll become replaceable.

They'll become disposable because I'll be able to pull data from them dynamically as needed. And maybe AI is finally gonna set us free from all these data lock-ins. What do you think?

Am I crazy? You're not crazy, but I think there's a little bit more to it than that. I love the idea of being able to finally escape from the chains of the database that's been silent silently toileting underneath the, the hood this whole time.

But the problem is that companies have a way of building in, you know, additional features that allow you to, uh, take advantage of some tweaks. Uh, my, my favorite is from the networking world, that while OSPF is a standard R protocol, nobody's OSPF is identical amongst any of the implementations because they all do something a little bit different to handle corner cases or increase performance. Because it's, one of the other things that I'm hearing from a lot of companies is I, uh, do research into AI security is that a lot of these data platforms are kind of monolithic and built in a certain way to do things in a very certain like cadence.

And when you need it to do something other than that, you eventually end up having to build your, your own version of it because you need, you know, better performance for record retrieval or something like that. Or the, the snowflake can't mung the, the data the way they want it to, and, and then they go out and build their own. And then they realize that maintaining their own is stupidly hard.

And by that point, hopefully, uh, a more standard model is, uh, caught up with some of the features that they need. I, I think that ultimately what's going to happen is that companies are going to agree on a set of standards that everybody should adhere to, which is what the whole standards body should be, because they don't want to do the hard work of programming a better solution on the onside. They wanna sell features to companies that are gonna buy on, you know, the, the front side, right?

Um, you know, it, it allows you to, I don't know, solve the riddles of the universe or I, I don't know, make sure your CEO's never late for a meeting, but that means that the data on the back end has to be consistent. It has to be usable, it has to not exist in some kind of weird foreign SQL language that nobody understands anymore. And that part's boring for most developers.

So we all just agree we're all gonna use this database even though we hate it, because the best one we've got right now, 'cause I don't wanna write another one. Grima, do you agree with that? Were you just putting up with the database up?

I think, uh, this is great arguments, right? And uh, again, uh, there are flip sides to both, uh, uh, if you don't put implementation meat to all this, it becomes a checklist item, right? So who invest in those standards?

So I think there is a right balance to be found, and this is to be found by the community itself. I mean, that is the beauty of, you know, all these standards and open source initiatives that once the community buys into this, I think it'll all, um, you know, already be evolving and trying to kind of foster the need in the right direction. John probability assessment that I'm gonna see Oracle any near this project.

That's a good question. Wow. Yeah, with them, you never, you never know whether what, whatever they tell you.

Um, that aside, um, this was, I think going back to think where something Robert said, this is a very savvy move by Snowflake. You know, you, you, you, you collaborate with others and then you benefit in the end. So, um, I, I, I think there's a high probability of of success here.

I usually, I'm usually really down on consortiums, but this one, I'm, I, I think there's some upside. Wow. Robert, I'm always reminded of that saying, uh, if you wanna go fast, go alone.

Yeah. If you wanna go far, go with a team. Mm-hmm.

So Robert, you've been around these projects before, um, you know, it's interesting to me that they launched the project before they went to a consortium. So, um, to what degree are they just trying to force somebody's hand here and then they're just trying to force an issue and maybe whatever we come up with won't even look anything like this thing, but, um, how much politics is at play here? No, it's a thousand percent.

It's all political. Yeah, that's a hundred, a hundred percent. There you go.

I mean, look, it, it is, um, they wanted to get this out. Uh, you can see a lot of these announcements leading up till Q con because they want, they know everybody's gonna be there, so let's get it out there and we could talk about it in person. Um, and so this is, look, anytime you start working with, um, your partners, other ISVs, bring 'em in.

Uh, that's a good thing. But I think that BlackRock getting listed there, that's really interesting. Um, and they worked really hard to get an end user, um, involved, you know, with, with some, with some brand.

And BlackRock is great. They love sharing their opinion, uh, good, bad or indifferent about technology. They're, they're, they're awesome about it.

And, um, so I, I think that this was their way of just getting this out. This is where we're going, would you like to join us? And so I think part of this was to get other people to join.

I don't think it was to, you know, warn anybody. I think they're committed to this. I think they want to make it successful.

And I believe they announced it so that they could get more support, multiple hands make for shallow bugs. I play devil's advocate here, and Robert, you know, this game, right? Um, we have played it, uh, many times that, you know, standardization, um, all always relies on the fact that what is the intent?

If the intent is capitalism, it would not fly. So I think, uh, there is some course correction and some learnings which needs to take place because, um, uh, if you see, uh, how the community will join in this movement is the reputation and the intent and, uh, the aspects that, you know, how do you invite the contributors in the space, right? So I, I believe that there will be some trigger points if they really want to make it a success.

They would like to bring in people who have high credibility and reputation within the community to drive some initiatives, right? They need to, uh, focus on how to build a broader capacity with community, right? So how that contribution, uh, takes place.

And then the third aspect is intent. You know, the intent need it is needless to say, if it is commercialization or capitalism, it wouldn't fly at the end, I think. Do you, I think I do think that, oh, I'm sorry, Mike, I just wanted to, to add to that, you know, you're, you're absolutely right.

Grima, I bet you the big takeaway from this, what's happening right now, now that this is, has gotten announced, is that everybody that competes with BlackRock is looking at this like, well, wait a minute. If BlackRock is doing this, maybe we should. And that's much more powerful than the tech companies getting involved.

That's really interesting. A lot of conversations in Jersey and Long Island, Connecticut and Manhattan happening right now. I think that Tom has the right point.

There is a lot of end users who are just p****d off and fed up with IT companies that have taken their data and locked it up for them and they can't get to it. And I think that, you know, there's gonna be a movement around this. And this may not be the specific specification that drives it, but it is an ongoing conversation.

And so my prediction is we will see the launch of something called the Data Freedom Foundation, Gave me All these kinds of little projects around one notion is that the data belongs to the people who created it and not the people who provided the IT platform that housed it. 'cause people are getting angry. And you, and, and as you can see, there's a, there's a trend around that whole topic for the last three series.

So anyway, I wanna thank our folks for sharing their knowledge and their expertise today. As always, they were great. And I want to encourage you all to stay tuned for the next lineup of the Techstrong, that tv, uh, portfolio of shows that are coming up right behind us.

They're all equally awesome. And thank you for spending some time with us. We'll see you next time.