(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts it's The Cube covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, RedHat and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost John Troyer. We always want to give the community what they want. and I think from the early returns on day one, we brought back Mark Shuttleworth. So Mark, founder of Canonical, had you on yesterday. A lot of feedback from the communities, so welcome back. >> Thank you, great to be here and looking forward to questions from the community and you. >> Yeah, so let's start with, we love at the show you get some of these users up on stage and they get to talk about what they're doing. We were actually, John and I, were catching up with a friend of ours that talked about how a private cloud, the next revision is going to use OpenStack, so really, OpenStack's been a little under the covers in many ways. The composability of OpenStack now, we're going to see pieces of it show up a lot of places. We've heard a lot about the Telco places, maybe talk about some of the emerging areas, enterprise customers, that you find for Ubuntu and OpenStack specifically? >> Sure. Well it seems as if every industry has a different name for the same phenomenon, right. So, for some it's "digital", for other's it's essentially a transformation of some aspect of what they're doing. The Telcos call it NFV, in media you have OTT as a sort of emerging threat and the response, in every case, is really to empower developers. That's why it's such a fun time to be a software developer, because the established guys realize that if they aren't already competing with Silicon Valley, they're going to be competing with Silicon Valley. So in each industry there's a sort of challenges or labels that they give this process of kind of unleashing developers and it's fun for us, because we get to be part of that in many cases. I think the big drivers under the hood, other than the operational and economic dynamics of cloudification, I think the really big changes are going to be machine learning, which seems to be moving very quickly into every industry. Retailers are using it for predictive analytics on what to put in store or what to recommend online. It just has this huge effect on almost any business when you figure out how to use your data in that way. All of that is developer driven, all of that needs this kind of underlying infrastructure to power it and it's kind of relevant to every industry. For us media is a key prospect, you know that we've done very, very well in Telco. Media is now a sort-of critical focus. Companies like Bloomberg for example us Ubuntu as an elastic platform for agility for the developers. They're a pretty astonishing operation; media company, but very tech-centric, very tech-savvy. I don't know if you've had them on the show. In retail, Ebay, PayPal it's kind of a crossover finance. They're all using Ubuntu in that sort of way. They may now see the major financials who are looking at the intersection of machine learning and transactions systems effectively as the driver for that kind of change. >> Stu: So in our last interview we talked about are companies making money in OpenStack and your answer, resoundingly, was yes. >> Mark: For us, certainly, yeah. >> One of the things we always look at is kind of the open source model itself. I was at DockerCon a few weeks ago, it's like everybody's using Docker. How do they make money? The question I get from a number of people in the community is, everybody I talk to knows Ubuntu, uses Ubuntu, when do they transition to paying for some of the products? >> Well so one of our key tenants is that we want to put no friction in front of developers. So many of the people that you'll meet here or that you'll meet at other developer-centric summits, they're developer-oriented. They're creatives, effectively. So our products, our commercial products aren't really designed to tax developers effectively. What we want is developers to have the latest and greatest platforms, to have that absolutely free, to be able to have confidence in the fact that it can go into production. When applications get into production, a whole different set of people get involved. For example the security guys will say, does this comply with FIPS security? And that's a commercial capability that customers get from Canonical if they wanted so we're now getting a set of security certifications that enable people to take apps on Ubuntu into production inside defense industries or other high security industries. Similarly if you look at the support life cycle, our standard public free support maintenance window is five years, which is a long time, but for certain applications it turns out the app needs to be in production for 10 years and again that's a driver for a different set of people. Not the developers, but for compilers and system administration operation types to engage with Canonical commercially. Sometimes we would walk through the building and the developers love us as everything's free and then the ops guys love us because we will support them for longer than we would support the developers. >> Can we talk about Open Source as a component of business models in general maybe, and how you would like to see the ecosystem growing, and even Canonical's business model. In the course of the last decade in the industry itself, right, a lot of people sniping at each other; "Well, you know open core is the way to go, open source is not a business model" there's a lot of yelling. You've been around, you know what works. How do you a set of healthy companies that use open source develop in our ecosystem? >> So this is a really, really interesting topic and I'll start at the high end. If you think of the Googles, and the Facebooks, and the Amazons, and the Microsofts, and the Oracles, I think for them open source is now a weapon. It's a way to commoditize something that somebody else attaches value to and in the game of love and war, or Go, or chess, or however you want to think of it, between those giants open source very much has become a kind of root to market in order to establish standards for the next wave. Right now in machine learning for example we see all of these major guys pushing stuff out as open source. People wouldn't really ask "what's the business model" there 'cause they understand that this is these huge organizations essentially trying to establish standards for the next wave through open source. Okay, so that's one approach. On the startup side it's a lot more challenging and there I think we need to do two things. So right now I would say, if you're a single app startup it's very difficult with open source. If you've got a brilliant idea for a database, if you've got a brilliant idea for a messaging system, it's very, very difficult to do that with open source and I think you've seen the consequences of that over the years. That's actually not a great result for us in open source. At the end of the day, what drives brilliant folks to invest 20 hours a day for three years of their life to create something new, part of it is the sense they'll get a return on that and so, actually, we want that innovation. Not just from the Googles, and the Oracles, and the Microsofts, but we want innovation from real startups in open source. So one of the things I'd like to see is that I'd like to see the open source community being more generous of spirit to the startups who are doing that. That's not Canonical, particularly, but it is the Dockers of the world, it is the RethinkDBs, as a recent example. Those are great guys who had really good ideas and we should caution open source folks when they basically piss on the parade of the startup. It's a very short-sighted approach. The other thing that I do need to do is we need to figure out the monetization strategy. Selling software the old way is really terrible. There's a lot of friction associated with it. So one of the things that I'm passionate about is hacking Ubuntu to enable startups to innovate as open source if they want to, but then deliver their software to the enterprise market. Everywhere where you can find Ubuntu, and you know now that's everywhere right? Every Global 2000 company is running Ubuntu. Whether we can call them a customer or not is another question. But how can we enable all those innovators and startups to deliver their stuff to all of those companies and make money doing it? That's really good for those companies, and it's really good for the startups, and that's something I'm very passionate about. >> We've seen such a big transformation. I mean, the era of the shrink wrapped software is gone. An era that I want to get your long term perspective on is, when it comes to internet security. Back to your first company, we had Edward Snowden and the keynote this morning talking about security, and he bashed the public cloud guys and said "We need private cloud, and you need to control a lot more there" any comments on his stuff, the public/private era and internet security in general today? Are we safer today than we were back in '99? >> We certainly are safer in part because of Edward Snowden. Awareness is the only way to start the process of getting stuff better. I don't think it's simplistically that you can bash the public clouds. For example Google does incredible work around security and there's a huge amount of stuff in the Linux stack today around security specifically that we have Google to thank for. Amazon and others are also starting to invest in those areas. So I think the really interesting question is, how do we make security easy in the field and still make it meaningful? That's something we can have a big impact on because security when you touch it it can often feel like friction. So for example we use AppArmor. Now AppArmor is a more modern of the SC Linux ideas that is just super easy to use which means people don't even know that they're using it. Every copy of Ubuntu out there is actually effectively as secure as if you've turned on SC Linux, but administrators don't ever have to worry about that because the way AppArmor works is designed to be really, really easy to just integrate and that allows each piece of the ecosystem, the upstreams, the developers, the end users to essentially upgrade their security without really have to think about that as a budget item or a work ticket item, or something that's friction. >> Mark, any conversations on the show surprise you? Excite you? There's always such a great collection of some really smart and engaged people at this show. I'm curious what your experience has been so far. >> Sure. I think it's interesting. Open Stack moved so quickly from idea to superstar. I guess it's like a child prodigy, you know, a child TV star. The late teens can be a little rocky, right? (Mark laughs) I think it will emerge from all of that as quite a thoughtful community. There were a ton of people who came to these shows who were just stuffed, effectively, there by corporates who just wanted to do something in cloud. Now I think the conversation is much more measured. You've got folks here who really want these pieces to fit together and be useful. Our particular focus is the consumption of OpenStack in a way that is really economically impactful for enterprises. But the people who I see continuing to make meaningful contributions here are people who really want something to work. Whether that's networking, or storage, or compute, or operations as in our case but they're the folks who care about that infrastructure really working rather than the flash in the pan types and I think that's a good transition for the community to be making. >> Can you say a little more about the future of OpenStack and the direction you see the community going. I don't know. If you had a magic wand and you look forward a couple of years. We talked a lot about operability and maintainability, upgradeability, ease of use. That seems to be one of the places that you're trying to drive the ecosystem. >> One of the things that I think the community is starting to realize is that if you try to please everybody, you'll end up with something nobody can really relate to. I think if you take the mission of OpenStack as to say, look, open source is going to do lots of complicated things but if we can essentially just deliver virtualized infrastructure in a super automated way so that nobody has to think about it, the virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks on demand. That's an awesome contribution to the innovation stack. There are a ton of other super shiny things that could happen on any given culture and ODS but if we just get that piece right, we've made a huge contribution and I think for a while OpenStack was trying to do everything for everybody. Lots of reasons why that might be the case but now I think there's a stronger sense of "This is the mission" and it will deliver on that mission, I have great confidence. It was contrarian then to say we shouldn't be doing everything, it's contrarian now to say "actually, we're fine". We're learning what we need to be. >> The ebb and flows of this community have been really interesting. NASA helped start it. NASA went to Amazon, NASA went back to OpenStack. >> Think about the economics of cars, right. It's kind of incredible that I can sit outside the building and pull up the app, and I have a car. It's also quite nice to own a car. People do both. The economics of ownership and the economics of renting, they're pretty well understood and most institutions or most people can figure out that sometimes they'll do a bit of either. What we have to do is, at the moment we have a situation where if you want to own your infrastructure the operations are unpredictable. Whereas if you rent it it's super predictable. If we can just put predictability of price and performance into OpenStack, which is, for example what the manage services, what BootStack does. Also what JUJU and MAAS do. They allow you to say, I can do that. I can do that quickly, and I don't have to go and open a textbook to do that or hire 50 people to do it. That essentially allows people now to make the choice between owning and renting in a very natural way, and I think once people understand that that's what this is all about it'll give them a sense of confidence again. >> Curious your viewpoint on the future of jobs in tech. We talked a little bit before about autonomous vehicles. It has the opportunity to be a great boon from a technology standpoint but could hollow out this massive amount of jobs globally. Is technology an enabler of some of these things? Do we race with the machines? We interviewed Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee from the MIT Sloan School. Did you personally have some thoughts on that? In places where Canonical looks about our future workforce, do we end up with "coding becomes the new blue collar job"? >> I don't know if I can speak to a single career but I think the simple fact is there's nothing magical about the brain. The brain is a mesh network competing flows and it makes decisions, and I think we will simulate that pretty soon and we'll suddenly realize there's nothing magical about the brain but there is something magical about humans and so, what is a job? A job is kind of how we figure out what we want to do most of the day and how we want to define ourselves in some sense. That's never going to go away. I think it's highly likely that humans are obsolete as decision makers and surprisingly soon. Simply because there's nothing magic about the brain and we'll build bigger and better brains for any kind of decision you can imagine. But the art of being human? That's kind of magical, and humans will find a way to evolve into that time. I'm not too worried about it. >> Okay. Last thing I want to ask is, what's exciting you these days? We've talked about space exploration a few times. Happy to comment on it. I mean, the last 12 months has been amazing to watch for those of us. I grew up studying engineering. You always look up to the stars. What's exciting you these days? >> Well the commercialization of space, the commercial access to space is just fantastic to see, sure, really dawning and credit to the Bezoses and the Musks who are kind of shaking up the status quo in those industries. We will be amongst the stars. I have no doubt about it. It will be part of the human experience. For me personally, I expect I'll go back to space and do something interesting there. It'll get easier and easier and so I can pack my walking stick and go to the moon, maybe. But right now from a love of technology and business point of view, IoT is such rich pickings. You can't swing a cat but find something that can be improved in a very physical way. It's great to see that intersection of entrepreneurship and tinkering suddenly come alive again. You don't have to be a giant institution to go and compete with the giant institutions that are driving the giant clouds. You just have to be able to spot a business opportunity in real life around you and how the right piece of software in the right place with the right data can suddenly make things better and so it's just delicious the sort of things people are doing. Ubuntu again is a great platform for innovating around that. It's just great fun for me to see really smart people who three years ago would say, do I really want to go work at a giant organization in Silicon Valley? Or can I have fun with something for a while that's really mine and whether that's worth 12 bucks or 12 billion who knows? But it just feels fun and I'm enjoying that very much, seeing people find interesting things to do at the edge. >> Mark Shuttleworth, appreciate being able to dig into a lot more topics with you today and we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from OpenStack 2017 in Boston. You're watching the cube. (electronic music)