Why Contributing to Open Source Matters! | Andrew Aitken - Hedera Hashgraph

much Otto um yeah so I'm I'm really excited to be here I had the chance yesterday to spend time uh at our booth and had dozens and dozens of really great conversation there's really good energy here uh I can tell um it is a little bit early for some people but uh that's all right so so what we're going to talk about uh a little bit is is why open source matters why contributing to open source matters um and for those of you who may not know hyera is we are a layer one uh we are fully open source today and uh we're really known for our due to our hashgraph consensus algorithm we are known for being the lowest carbon impact blockchain and we're also known for uh our governing Council so as you can see we have a lot of well recognized brands from across the planet and when I first joined I've been here about six months when I first joined uh I was really excited to be a part a part of hia but but I wondered how a governing Council of 31 members was going to work I'm like holy crap it's going to take a long time to get stuff done and I've been very pleasantly surprised that that isn't the case this group is actually really really efficient and our governance model is really really effective so pardon me okay there we go so who am I a little bit about my background uh so I live in Durango Colorado it's a short 6 and 1 half hour drive here from the from the venue uh my passions are my my wife and my teenage daughter uh as you can tell I'm also a big skier I hope people are going to be going up to the after event in Breen Ridge I'll I'll see you there I'll be there for a couple days uh and uh I also in this summer I do a lot of four-wheeling up in the mountains and I'm a bit of a bit of a wine geek that comes I spent 22 years in Silicon Valley and I spent a lot of weekends up in Napa so a little bit of a wine geek um I've also spent a lot a lot of time in in open source and I've had the opportunity to work with with well over a hundred different organizations helping them understand how to leverage open source uh for their for their organizations from large entities like the microsofts and ibms and HPS of the world to dozens and dozens of startups and also a lot of a lot of end users um I with a partner launched and ran the uh well uh being a wine geek I wanted to figure out how I could write off my wine purchases legitimately his business expense so a buddy and I invited some friends to to Napa and we gave this this weekend event a really prestigious name called The Open Source thing tank so we were up there and we had a great time great conversations we able to write off our wine purchases and decide hey next year let's do it a little bit bigger so in essentially for 10 years we invited 120 of the top open source thought leaders from around the world to join us and what we found out is hey we can write off our wine make a little bit of money but most importantly have just awesome conversations with some of the smart arest people in open source and I learned a tremendous amount from from those 10 years uh again I've had an opportunity to work on with well over 100 clients one of those the mbci mbci there stands for Mississippi band of Chaka Indians that was one of the more unusual open source engagements I have so they made a whole bunch of money from their res for their Casino and Resort operations they someone told them about open source and they decide we want to diversify so we actually put an Investment Portfolio together how to invest in open source software and hardware and we got to present to the uh uh Chiefs of the tribal council and that was really fun engagement these were some of the sharpest people I I have ever met um the point being is that I've seen a lot from large to small I've seen a lot of what works and what different Works what hasn't worked and then hopefully bringing some of that to hadera and to the stage today so we're we are talking about why contributing to open source matters or why should you open source stuff right and hopefully at the end this will this will give you a bit of an idea of why it's actually important so let's talk about why why it actually does matter probably aware that open source really is the foundation for virtually every single technology in invention since the internet has been has come along the internet cloud computing Ai and of of course uh DLT so I'm assuming that all of you are actually consuming open source you're building your Solutions on top of Open Source um but are you actually contributing are you giving back so we're going to talk about why that's important that first number last year GitHub um exceeded a 100 million developers on their platform that's a lot of people they also had 98 million new projects last year and today they have a total of over 420 million it's important to keep in mind not all open source is done on GitHub so this is this is the largest portion but it also happens elsewhere so these numbers are even actually bigger uh they had four and a half billion code contributions uh to their projects now what's important to take away from these numbers are the first and the third numbers right so 100 million developers but over 420 million projects so what that actually tells us is there's far more demand for developer mind share than actually exists out there that makes it a little bit tough to do what what what we want to do so that's something we have to pay attention to and that equation is not going to change for the near future whoa that's interesting I didn't put that animation in um just happened all right so although hidea is not solely about the Enterprise that we are we are focused on the Enterprise but we also had uh other types of use cases like karate combat and caxy and open source is of course not all about the the Enterprise that's how we're going to that's what we're going to talk about or I'm going to talk about it's really an easy way to to communicate the impact of of Open Source today so why does the Enterprise care about open source really there's three core reasons it's Innovation it's cost and it's their developer and the greater developer community so I got to work with a large Bank in the UK a few years ago and they were considering deploying a logging and monitoring application in analytics not that sexy but every everybody has one right so they were looking at a one open source solution called elastic and three different proprietary Solutions at the end of the day they selected the open source solution elastic the reason they did so initially was for cost reasons it was it was more cost effective than the proprietary software but what they really found out is the being a part of a huge active Innovative Community that's evolving the software on a continual basis had huge huge advantages and so they were able to deploy this software and they found out it didn't quite exactly meet all their needs so their developer Community jumped on board and they began actually customizing this software because they could they gave some of those contributions back some they didn't um but what they noticed after a couple years of this not only did it work but that group that was responsible had the lowest ret uh lowest loss of developer rate highest retention rate in the whole bank and so what they realized is their developers wanted to work on the software and this is one of the key reasons for Enterprises to adopt open source because you know what it's not really cool to work at a large Bank sorry Ian um it's it's it's not and so Enterprises are investing in open source as a way to lower costs Drive Innovation and keep and and bring to them the best developer Community okay so some of the data points around Enterprise adoption 30% which is actually a really big number and that's growing all the time have OS those are called that's open source program offices so they take it they invest millions in creating these offices they take open source very seriously it's strategic to them right and so an Oso is typically centered in their in centered that or housed in their Engineering Group but it also has roles from people participate from HR and procurement and security and other functions from around around the bank or the ad Enterprise and the reason they're doing this is because they they need to run that software and manage it as effectively and as efficiently as possible and part of that reason is today the average Enterprise can is is using over 20,000 different open source components and some far more than that and what they care about really is making sure that they're secure and that the software that they consume is supportable that there's a community around it and so they need to have this centralized organization to help manage all of this help engage with the external Community because if you think about it the ingestion model the software ingestion model by a large bank is really complicated right they build their own software they grab stuff down from the from the internet they buy software from startups they buy software from large Enterprises people don't real like sap people don't realize over 80% of sap is built on open source and they work with large systems integrators who contribute open source so they have this open source software coming at them from all different angles and if you look at one security issue anybody familiar with log 4J about four years ago so log forj is a fairly common commonly used library right and the after vulnerability was discovered in the first three days post that vulnerability there were 850,000 attacks on Enterprises across the planet right log 4J is only the 21st most widely used open source library and today well it's about six months ago I saw the last stat 177% of log 4J libraries that are downloaded are of the unremediated version right so that's why the Enterprise needs to figure out how to manage the open source that they're consuming really effectively right and how many of you love how many of you passionate about documenting the software you write right how many of you just love documentation you're you're a unicorn it's not usual all right um most developers are at at best ambivalent about it right when the when the Enterprise gets involved in open source projects they actually encourage their contributors their developers to do documentation because they want good documentation for themselves so I always point this out as a reason why we want to engage with with the Enterprise Community because their developers will help you with your documentation all right so why does this matter to you the whole reason behind creating an open source Community or your own open source ecosystem and I've seen this so so many times when it's done when it's done well is collaboration in your community will drive revenue for you it can drive new products new features it can bring you into new geographies you'll get Fe back on your business model right um getting your partners and your customers involved in your own open source ecosystem has huge advantages right it's you're building something that's really sticky you get your you get your customers involved in your ecosystem they don't want to leave they want to be a part of the organization they will they will tell you what's working what's not working they will tell you if they like your business model they will help you with your product road map and again I've I've seen this work many times over the years I've also seen it not work but it it can now there's a great example of this ecosystem I have here it's called fas.org It's called The fintech Open Source foundation so this organization was created about six years ago for financial services to some of the most conservative Enterprises on the planet to open source more software and so that's what they've done over the last 6 years and you have today over 40 of the largest financial institutions on the planet from Black Rock MasterCard Visa Fidelity Goldman Sachs JP Morgan on and on and on that are members of this foundation and the whole idea is one open source their software share Innovation Drive Innovation share costs um and so the and you have really high you have vendors that are a part of this community that are open their open sourcing their software to all these Banks so it's a great example if you ever want to see an example of how this ecosystem can work really well for all of us that's a that's a good one so one absolutely key lesson that I've learned and that I coach when I people when I'm talking to them about helping to open source their software or create a uh create an open source Community it's really the most open sour the most successful open source projects appeal to the self-interests of their community and who they want to be a member of their Community right do you are you people participating in your community because they want to build cool stuff are they there because they want to bring cool stuff back to their employer are they there because they want to make money or combination of all of that figure that out all right figure that why are Partners there why are other D do other daps want to potentially be a part of our community why do our customers want to be and then appeal to that self-interest right if it's an Enterprise help them understand that by participating they can make your your stuff more secure if it's another if it's another app vendor help them understand how they can make money from being a part of your community appeal to the self-interest there's nothing wrong with that right so this a quick snapshot I know it's a really ugly ey chart up there um but this simply this represents our own ecosystem of communities how they're intergrated the the interrelated these are different projects within our within our stack um when you get online we can use the company called bgia as building these tools for us you can actually drill down it's 100% interactive in real time and you can see which projects are growing which aren't how they're connected to other projects but what I really wanted to show is this is a this is the guardian platform and so this is one of our projects um it's a it's a really comprehensive policy workflow engine that you can build sophisticated ESG apps with and when I came on board and I started getting uh information like this about our own communities I'd love this this is awesome this is what we want to do it's got 89 different contributors it's got 24 organizations it's got thousands and thousands of contributions it's a great start for us this is a platform that has a whole bunch of use cases in production we've got vendors Partners customers that are participating in this community it's a great start a great example it's not big enough we need it to be bigger hopefully if I do this in a couple years these numbers are 200% 300% but this is exactly what you want one of your projects to look like so how do you actually make this happen well the first part is open source Something That Matters to someone else not to you right it's great open source your stuff but make sure that you're also open sourcing Something That Matters to your audience because if you don't it's a non-starter make it easy to use I can't stress this enough and then when you thought you've made it really easy to use make it easier I worked with one company actually in Colorado years ago and it it took four hours for people to download the software configure it before they could actually start doing something with it and they wondered why they didn't have a lot of adoption right so they worked really really really hard and they got that down to 28 minutes and they saw a 600% increase in the uptake of their software so that's what I mean make it easy make it simple to use um and this is really important make sure there is value at no cost forever in your community make sure there is something that you are open sourcing even your partners or open sourcing that is at no cost somebody can just download it play with it and it has value it does something for them if everything you open source is tied to something that costs money that's a bait and switch and your customer customers will figure that out really quickly so that's important have something have a nugget of what you're open sourcing that will have value and not not at Cost okay and it's it's hard to do this right it's actually hard I usually to tell people it's going to take a lot of effort and even if you execute well it's going to take probably a couple years to do it right but it is absolutely well worth it so if you want to learn more about who we are we're actually right around the corner at Booth 105 love for you to come and join us and ask questions we we don't have a lot of time for questions here um and then come open source with hadera so I've got one I've got one minute I've got one last question I want to see if anyone here um knows their their open source history so does anybody know who this man is RMS and do you know what his Persona is that he's showing you right here this is St ganas and St ganous so um Richard stalman actually we all think of Linux as being invented by Lena stals and others um but I've seen him make developers cry because they didn't call it ganu Linux so Linux is a k Colonel ganu is the actual operating system and RMS invented ganu Linux but he is the founder of kind of the whole open source movement so again hopefully some of you will come in open source with hia thank you very much for your [Applause] time all right very much Andrew that was great um our next talk will be in just a couple of minutes so I don't know if you want to do questions um have 18 seconds we might have time for one or two questions corner at 105 at Booth 105 and I am happy to answer questions right around the corner if I any questions thanks for your attention thanks everyone thank