>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco, Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, my co-host John Troyer, and we are here with David Levine, Assistant General Counsel of Red Hat, we've got the lawyer in the house. Who's billing for this hour? >> Exactly. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John, it's good to be here. >> So, obviously the legal challenges, putting GDPR aside, which I don't want to get on that rant, we're not going to talk about, is licenses. In open source, this has been an enabler but also an inhibitor for many in not knowing what license to use or what code is, licenses mean for them, their role in the community, all of this stuff could be a morass of gray area, or just no one's educated in some cases, right? So it's tough. >> And that's what I do. I mean my job is to help bring some order to what you describe as some morass, right. How do we help reassure especially enterprises that it's safe to go in the water, it's safe to use open source. Red Hat is an open source company, our entire business is built on open source, and that sort of has a couple aspects to it. One is on the development side, you know we collaborate in the development of software, but what really enables that are licenses, open source licenses. And much of Red Hat's software is built on top of a particular license, which is called the copyleft license. It's known as the GPL or the General Public License. And it's a great tool to foster collaboration, right? What copyleft means is if I create a piece of software under a copyleft license and I give this software to you, I give it to you with all my copyrights. So you have the right to copy it, to distribute it to John, to improve upon it, but the only requirement is if you give it to John, you have to give it to him with the same rights and you have to give him the source code, and if you improve upon it, you have to license the improvements to him under those same rights. So it's this whole virtuous circle, right? I create something, I give it to you, you're able to continue to improve on it, you redistribute it, and we all get to share... >> Furrier: So if I create value, do you get that back? >> If you decide to distribute it to me, you don't have to, >> OK. >> David: But if you distribute it to someone else, then you have to give it back with all those same rights. >> Furrier: So you're paying it forward, basically all the rights forward, >> Exactly. >> Furrier: A dose of good ethos. But then if I improve upon, I create a derivative work, whatever the legal jargon is, >> Right, right. >> Furrier: And I have, this is a magic secret sauce, ten percent of it is magic secret sauce, now I distribute that product, I pass along the license. >> David: Correct. >> Including my secret sauce. >> David: If you decide to, there's nothing that requires you to do it, so a lot of our customers sort of build their secret sauce internally, they keep it within their companies and it doesn't go out any further than that, and that's perfectly fine, but if you decide to distribute it, you have to continue to... >> What does that mean, >> Furrier: Distribute, distribute the software to a partner or the product itself? >> David: It could be both. >> So the product is sold publicly as a service, say a cloud service, and I've got some secret sauce. >> David: So if it's a service, it's a great question and it goes into legal issues, but generally speaking, if you're providing a service that's not a distribution, so I don't really have access to the software. >> Furrier: That's actually a really good thing for developers. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's an issue, we are now in a service-oriented world so that's a, we are, maybe that's one of the next things that we as a technology community and an IT industry have to deal with. Certainly, it seems though, David, before we get into the new news here and the specifics of the new development, but open source was scary... A generation or two ago. It seems like, at this point especially in cloud, it's the new normal. Is that as you, inside Red Hat, as you all look at your landscape, it doesn't seem like you have, do you have big Fortune 100 lawyers coming in and yelling at you now versus ten years ago? >> It's a great point. So I've been at Red Hat for 13 years now, so I've seen sort of tremendous change over the years, and when I started in 2005, we were having a lot of discussions with customers about the copyleft aspects of the GPL, you know, this requirement to give back, and there were companies that were concerned about this, but over time, they've become more sophisticated and they're realizing that, notwithstanding what their lawyers were telling them, it really wasn't that dangerous, and I have very few of those conversations today. Most people get it. >> Furrier: And also a lot's changed since that time, I mean right now I think people are seeing the benefits of projects being out in the open, where it's fostering great collaboration. And the productization piece can still exist >> Yeah. >> With that, so that dynamic between productization, AKA commercialization, and open source projects is interesting. So you could almost make the argument, it's easier to be compliant if you just make everything open source because, rather than just re-engineering any fixes, the community can do it for you. >> David: Absolutely. >> So this efficiency's already been proven. >> David: Absolutely. And you know, customers are concerned about compliance with all of the obligations under the open source licenses, and one of the things that I try to tell customers is if you take open source, you build it into a product, rather than spend a lot of time focusing on pulling out the obligations into a separate file, just make the source code available, republish it and you get to participate, you get to push your contributions upstream and so you a whole community that's supporting the contributions that you described. >> Furrier: Okay, so what's the big news here that GPL, version 2, okay, so first of all, what's the current situation? You guys made a quick tweak in this GPL 2-3 situation, what was the current situation, what was the motivation? Why the change? What's the impact? >> David: So I talked earlier about the GPL and the GPL has very exacting requirements. I mentioned that if you're going to distribute the software to John, you have to give him the source code, and you have to include a copy of the license. Understanding what is source code, what has to be, what has to accompany it, depending on how you're distributing the software, that's not always an easy question, and so companies don't always get it right. And one of the challenges with GPL, version 2 is that there is no grace period, and so if you miss something, if you make a mistake in the way that you've tried to meet your license obligations, your license is terminated and you're a copyright infringer, sort of, right at that point in time, and that scares a lot of our customers, it scares enterprises. They need more predictability, they want some level of fairness. >> This is the grace period you're talking about. >> David: Yeah, this the grace period. So, there's no grace period in version 2 of the General Public License. That problem was fixed when they came out ten years ago with version 3 of the GPL. So version 3 included this grace period in it, but the challenge is that a lot of code today remains GPL, version 2, so what do we do with that large existing code base? And so, the solution was to adopt the cure provision, or the grace provision from GPL, version 2, I'm sorry, version 3, for GPL, version 2 code. Stop me if I'm speaking too quickly or if I'm getting too technical. So the idea is >> Let's rewind just back 30 seconds. So, do a little playback. So, if we can apply GPL, v.3 to the v.2 code, >> So, the cure period. >> Oh, just the cure period. >> So I'm adopting >> David: the cure period. >> Got it. >> David: So, the license stays the same, the only difference is, I've said that if you fail to meet your obligation to John when you redistribute, I'm going to give you 30 days to fix the problem. >> Furrier: So essentially you grandfather in the v.2 with the grace period. >> We're giving this grace period. >> Troyer: And this is a corporate promise. This doesn't change the license, this is a corporate promise. >> So it's a promise >> David: by any copyright holder, so in my example to you, I'm the sole copyright holder here, but in the Linux kernel, there are thousands of copyright holders. So the Linux kernel developers back in October adopted this same approach, adopted the GPL v.3 cure period for the Linux kernel, which continues to be licensed under GPL, version 3. And then in December, Red Hat led a group of companies that included IBM, Google, Facebook, we all adopted it for our own copyrights. So, we together, those four companies own a lot of copyrights to open source code. And then again in March, six more companies joined us. SAP, Microsoft, Cisco, HPE, Soothsay, CA Technologies, and at the Red Hat Summit today, we're asking developers to do the same thing. We want to show that it's a movement, that we want to cooperate in enforcement, because we think ultimately if we want more people to join the open source ecosystem, we can do that by making enforcement more predictable. >> Furrier: And so what specifically are you asking startups? What's the ask for developers? >> For developers, if you go to, we have a site on GitHub, so it's the GPL Cooperation Commitment, so gplcc.github.io/gplcc. >> And what do they do, just take a guess? >> And you go there, and there's the statement, the same commitment that the company's made, and you go in and add your name to the bottom of the file and submit a pull request, like developers know how to do on GitHub, and your name will be added as a supporter. >> Into the record. >> David: It would apply to every new copier. >> That gives them the primary source (mumbles), or write... >> David: It gives anyone who takes that code, has that piece of mind. >> Furrier: Well, great stuff, great one-on-one on the GPL v.2, v.3 grace period, it's super cool you guys are doing that. It's just such a hassle, I'm sure the complaints have been crazy. The bigger question for me as I look at, cause I love that the innovation comes from open source, we're seeing that both on the collaborative side in the project, but also people are really productizing open source and its running everything. The question is, where do I have code that I, you know, people are programming like crazy, they're slinging code like it's nobody's business right now. So, I might be afraid I'd be liable if I'm an enterprise or a startup that, through venture capital or an M&A process where something's going on, wait a minute, we can't actually sell this because that's his code over there. You didn't comply with the license, so there's always these tripwires in the mind, and sometimes that's just fear, this is a general kind of license hygiene practice. What's your take on that? What's your advice to entrepreneurs, to enterprise developers, to be safe? What should they do as their approach? >> David: That's a great question. I mean, what you want to know is where's my code coming from? And you have, it's a license issue, but it's also a product security issue. If you're taking something from someone, they took it from two places down the food chain, what's the provenance of that code? So, just like from a security perspective... >> Furrier: I've seen M&As go south because of this. >> Yes, so you want to know the source of your code, get it from a trusted source. Make sure that you understand what the license terms are. One of the things that we're trying to encourage developers to do is make sure you attach a license to it, because if you don't, a user or startup's not going to know what rights they have. And that can become problematic if they have a liquidity fight. >> Furrier: Okay, so here's my next question. So, the next question is obviously open source is growing and people are joining projects and/or creating projects. So this is a hypothetical: I have a project and I want to donate to CUBE code, to the open source CUBE community. Do I just ship the code, do I have to pick the license, what's the best license? And then I want to also have in the mind that I might use Linux and other things, so I have code I've written, proprietary code I want to open it up, I've got to pick a license, like, do I just go like that and pick the license out of the hat, or... >> Lots of times, it's sort of dictated for you. So it depends on the ecosystem that you're working with. I mean, if you're working in the Linux kernel ecosystem, generally it's going to be GPL, version 2. So you have to look at what other projects you're working with, is this part of a particular project that already has an existing license? And then it's a philosophical point. I mentioned before, the GPL is a copyleft license. It forces sharing, right, so it protects John's rights downstream from you, but there are other licenses that are permissive and give you lots of rights, but you could decide what you want to do with it downstream. So if you're okay with people taking your code downstream from you and making it proprietary, then using a permissive license is fine. But if you want to ensure this virtuous circle, then you want to pick a copyleft license. >> Troyer: Paul, do you think we have reached the end stage of open source licenses here? Are you, you know, GPL v.3 is ten years old, and after we started from MIT and Apache, and I could probably list a couple of others and I haven't even been paying attention, so, are we settled down, are we about done? Are you looking for things? >> David: That's a great question. So I was at a conference two weeks ago in Barcelona put on by the Free Software Foundation in Europe, and one of the conference sessions was The Future of Copyleft. You know, is there going to be another copyleft license? Do we need GPL, version 4? It's, you look at what the GPL has done and how many projects are governed by it, and how it's forced this collaboration, it's done amazing things, but it's pretty complicated. So is there a simpler way of accomplishing the same objectives? But I don't know that people have the stomach... >> Furrier: And the answer is? >> Uh, (laughing). I'll come back next year and let you know what I learn... >> Were you worried about, and now I'm going to ask, have to ask this, ask me how you can support open source licensing, so I'll ask you: how can you and me support open source licensing? >> David: So, take the GPL v.3 Cure Commitment, commit your name to supporting greater stability and predictability and fairness in the way enforcement takes place. So, I mean it's an exciting project. It's kind of fun to pull the whole community together. >> It's quite an accomplishment, too if you think about open source principles are now, again, we don't want to skew other events, but okay, this beginning of another generation of open source greatness certainly, remember the glory days when there was a Tier 2 citizen in the enterprise, you guys made it Tier 1 but now it's going to a whole other level with Cloud-Native, and you're seeing open source ethos being applied to other markets, not just software development. So, you're starting to see the success create this circle of innovation. Have you guys had the "pinch me" moments inside Red Hat, saying, "hey, this is actually working, and really well"? >> David: I think just a couple touchpoints, I mean, I think, look at where Microsoft has come, right? When I joined Red Hat, that wasn't a friendly relationship, but now they've embraced it. Who would have thought 15 years ago that we'd see Microsoft on board and we have. And your point about where else is open source going; one of my colleagues spoke about a year ago to seed developers who were interested in open sourcing seeds, because there was concern about seeds becoming patented and not being able to grow food. And so, thinking about ways to open up the market in seeds. >> Productization is a great thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> On the legal front, what's on the horizon? Any hurdles you see, opportunities, challenges that your guys are working on? Obviously, there's always the legal framework, we just commented before you came on with Chris Wright about Blockchain and some of the tokenization around content, we might even see a token economics model in software down the road. So, a lot of interesting legal things happening to rights if you open them up. What's your thoughts on the future? >> So, one of the areas that we're focused on, as is Red Hat, is containers. So what does it mean if you put open source software layers in a container? What does it mean if there are proprietary layers in there? Does it mean if you add, if you take my open source software, add a proprietary component, package it in a container and give that container to John, what does it mean for your proprietary layer? Is that, does that have to be licensed under the GPL? And so we spent a lot of time thinking about that a number of years ago and luckily concluded that it may improve the situation as opposed to adding any concerns, so we're thinking about the impact of open source licensing and containers, ensuring, again to your point earlier, what's the provenance of the code? There's so much code now available, making sure that there is a license associated with it. >> It's almost, you just declare all code free. (all laughing) >> Absolutely. >> Well certainly a lot of new things you're seeing, societal change is impacted, you've got self-driving cars and all kinds of new things that are just mind-blowing on a legal framework standpoint. First-time challenges, so you're busy, you're always going to have an interesting job. >> I really think that I have the best job in Red Hat, because I get to think about these things. What does it mean from a licensing perspective? What are the new issues that we're going to face as the technology evolves, the market evolves? And... >> Furrier: Super important, I mean there's tripwires in there, and again, if you don't think about it probably, I know or I've seen from experience, great companies lose big-time acquisition opportunities because of some faulty code on a license, and it's just killed things, and I've seen enterprises get (laughing). I mean, little weird things could happen, you've just got to be on top of it. >> David: I mean, look at what Tesla did in open sourcing their patents, making their patented technology available so that, to help the whole autonomous car industry. We've been doing a lot of work in the patent area as well to ensure that patents don't become an inhibitor to the change that you've described. >> Furrier: It's a great conversation, provocative, legal and open source software. These are competitive advantages and opportunities, not challenges and compliance, old-school guarded secrets. Open it up and good things happen. David, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the insights on the legal perspectives of licenses as open source software continues to power the globe on a global basis, the global economy, and the technology innovation coming. It's theCUBE, bringing you all the live action here in San Francisco. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (upbeat music) (inspirational music)

San Francisco it's the Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat okay welcome back everyone this is the cube live in San Francisco for Red Hat summit 2018 I'm John for the co-host of the cube and this week for three days of wall-to-wall coverage my co-host analyst is John Tory the co-founder of check reckoning and advisory and community development services firm industry legend formerly VMware's Bentley he was at the Q in 2010 our first ever cube nine years ago John Day one wrap up let's analyze what we heard and dissect and and put Red Hat into day one in the books but you know clearly it's a red-letter day for red hat so to speak your thoughts big day for open shift I think and hybrid cloud right we just saw a lot of signs here that we'll talk about that it's real there's real enterprises here real deployments in the cloud multi-cloud on-site hybrid cloud and i think there's really no doubt about that they really brought a brought the team out and you know red hat's become a bellwether relative to the tech industry because if you look at what they do there's so many irons on the fires but more the most important is that they have huge customer base in the enterprise which they've earned over a decades of work being the open source renegade to the open source darling and Tier one citizen they got a huge install basin they got to manage this so they can't just throw you know spaghetti at the wall they gotta have big solutions they're very technical company very humble but they do make some good tech bets absolutely we'll be talking with the folks from core OS tomorrow they have a couple of other action you know things we'll be talking about a lot of interesting partnerships the the most you know the thing here Linux is real and it's is the 20-year growth and that it's real in the enterprise and I mean the top line think the top line slowed and John is is is kubernetes than the gnu/linux for the cloud and I got to say there's some reality there yeah it's there's no doubt about it I mean then I've got my notes here just my summary for the day is on that point the new wave is here okay the glue layer that kubernetes and containers provide on top of say Linux in this case OpenShift a you know alternative past layer just a few years ago becomes the centerpiece of red hats you know architecture really providing some amazing benefits so I think what's clear is that this new shift this new wave is massive and we've heard on the cube multiple references to tcp/ip HTTP these are seminal moments where there's a massive inflection point where the games just radically changes for the better wealth creation happens startups boom new brands emerged that we've never heard of that just come out of the woodwork entrepreneurial activity hits an all-time high and they all these things are coming yeah I said John I was really impressed if we talk to a number of folks who are involved with technologies that some people might call legacy right we the Java programmers the IBM WebSphere folks they've been you you look at these technologies solid proven tested but yet still over here and adapted for today right and they talked about how they're fitting into openshift how they're fitting into modern application development and you're not leaving those people behind they're really here and you know the old joke going back to say Microsoft when Steve Ballmer was the CEO hell will freeze over when Linux isn't in in Microsoft ecosystem look today no further than what's going on in their developer Commerce called Microsoft build where Linux is the centerpiece of their open-source strategy and Microsoft has transformed themselves into a total open-source world so you know now you got Oracle with giving up Java II calling a Jakarta essentially bringing Java into an the Eclipse community huge move it's a kind of a nuance point but that's another signal of the shifts going on out in the open where communities aren't just yesterday's open source model a new generation of open source actors are coming in a new model I think the CNC F is showing it the Linux Foundation proves that you can have commercialization downstream with open source projects as that catalyst point as a big deal and I think that is happening at a new new level and it's super exciting to see yeah I mean open source is the new normal sure that that works it's in the enterprise but that doesn't mean that open source disappears it actually means that open source and communities and companies coming together to drive innovation actually gets more and more important I kind of thought well you know it's open source well everybody does open source but actually the the dynamics we're seeing of these both large companies partnering with small companies foundations like you talked about the Linux cutlasses various parts the Linux Foundation cloud boundary foundation etc right are really making a big impact well we had earlier on assistant general counsel David Levine and bringing about open source I think one key thing that's notable is this next generation of open source wave comes is the business model of open source and operationalizing it in not just server development lifecycle but in the business operation so for example spending resources on managing proprietary products with that have open source components separate from the community is a resource that you don't have to spend anymore if you just contribute everything to open source that energy can go away so I think open source projects and the product monetization component not new concepts is now highlighted as a bonafide competitive advantage across the company not just proven but like operationally sound legally verified certified and I think also you have to look at the distribution of open source versus the operation and management of open source we see a lot of management managed kubernetes coming out and in fact we didn't talk about today Microsoft big announcement here at the show Microsoft is on Azure is running a managed open ship not not kubernetes they already have kubernetes they're running a managed open ship another way of adding value to an open open source platforms to date directly to the IT operator honestly do you think these kind of deals would happen if you go back four years three years ago oh no way as you're running an open shift absolutely I mean were you crazy the you know the kingdom is turned upside down absolutely this is a notable point I want to get your reaction is because I see this absolutely as validation to the new wave being here with kubernetes containers as a de facto rallying point an inflection point big deals are happening IBM and Red Hat big deal we just talked about them with the players here two bellwether saying we're getting behind containers and two bays in a big way from that relationship essentially it changes the game literally overnight for IBM changes the game for Red Hat I think a little bit more for IBM than Red Hat already gets a ton of benefit but IBM instantly gets a cloud strategy that has a real scalable product market to it Arvind the the head of research laid that out and IBM now can go and compete with major players on deals with the private cloud more deals are coming absolutely this is the beginning now that everyone snapped into place is saying okay kubernetes and containers we now understand this the rallying cry a de facto standard I think a formation is going to happen in the next six to 12 months of major major major players now I mean we are in a not one size does not fit all world John so I mean we will continue to see healthy ecosystems I mean mesosphere and DT cos is still out there Dockers still out there right you will see very functional communities and and functioning application platforms and cloud platforms but you got to say the momentum is here I mean look at amine docker mace those fears look at when things like this happened this is my opinion so I'm just gonna say it out there when you have de facto standards that happen like this it's an opportunity to differentiate so I think what's gonna happen is docker meso sphere and others including the legacy guys like IBM and in others they have to differentiate their products they have to compete software companies so I think docker I think is come tonight at docker con but my opinion looking at from the outside is I think Dockers realized looking we can't make money from containers kubernetes is happening we're a great standard in that let's be a software company let's differentiate around kubernetes so this is just more pressure or more call-to-action to deliver good software hey it's never been of somebody said it's never been a better time to be an IT and IT infrastructure right this is a you think that the tools we have available to us super-powerful another key point I want to get your reaction on with kubernetes and containers this kind of de facto standardization is breathing new life into good initiatives and legacy projects so you think about OpenStack okay OpenStack gets a nice segmented approach is now clear with a where the swim lanes are you're an app developer you go over here and if you are a network and infrastructure guy you're going here but middleware a from talk to the Red Hat guys here we talk to IBM those legacy and apps can put a container around it and don't have to be thrown away and take their natural course now I think it's gonna be a three line through this holy a second life is for legacy and stuff and then to cloud is and it's in second inning because now you have the enablement for cloud your reaction the enablement of cloud Ibn iBM has cloud and then the market shares of nm who you believe they're not in that they're in the top three but they're not double digits according to synergy research and he bought us a little bit higher but still if you compare public cloud they're small they look at IBM's and tire and small base and saying if they have a specialty cloud that can be assembled quit Nellie yeah and scaled and maybe instantly successfully overnight yeah I think a few years ago you know there was a lot different always a few years back it always looks confusing right a few years back we were still arguing public cloud private cloud as private cloud ed is what is a true private cloud is that even valuable I still see people on Twitter making fun of everything anybody who's not 100% into the full public cloud which means they must not have talked to you know a lot of IT folks who have to business to run today so I think you're saying it's a it's a it's a multivalent world multi-cloud there's going to be differentiated clouds there's going to be operational clouds there's gonna be financial clouds and just it's it seems clear that you know from the perspective of right now here in San Francisco and 2018 that that you know the purpose of public-private hybrid seems pretty clear just like the purpose of like I said we're gonna in two weeks we'll be an openstack summit I mean the purpose of that seems pretty clear it's it's funny it's like I had this argument and each Assateague he thinks everything should go the public cloud goes eaten has one of the public clouds but he's kind of right and I and I and we talked about this way I with him I said if everything is running cloud operation we're talking about cloud ops we're talking about how its managed how its deployed code bases across the board if everything is clarified from an OP raishin standpoint the Dearing on Prem and cloud and IOT edge is there's no difference stuffs moving around so you almost treats a data center as an edge network so now it's sexually all cloud in my mind so then and also you do have to keep in mind time time horizons right anybody who has to do work the today this quarter right has to keep in mind what's what what portfolio of business deeds and tools do I have right now versus what it's gonna look like in a few years all right so I want to get your thoughts on your walk away from today I'll start my walk away from day one was talking some of the practitioners Macquarie Bank and Amadeus to me they're a tell signed the canary in the coalmine what's happening horizontally scalable synchronous infrastructure the new model is here now we're seeing them saying things like it's a streaming world not just Kafka for streaming data streaming services levels of granularity that at workers traded with containers and kubernetes up and down the stack to me architects who think that way will have a preferred advantage over everybody else that to me was like okay we're seeing it play out I guess I totally agree right the future isn't evenly distributed my takeaway though is there's certainly a future here and the people we talked to today are doing real-world enterprise scale multi-cloud micro services and modern architectures incorporating their legacy applications and components and that and they're just doing it and they're not even breaking a sweat so I think IT has really changed ok day one coverage continues day two tomorrow we have three days of wall-to-wall coverage day two and then finally day three Thursday here in San Francisco this is the cubes live coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the videos they're gonna be going up as soon as they are done live here and check out all the cube alumni and check out Silicon angle comm for all news coverage then of course you got tech reckoning Jon's company's the co-founder of for John Fourier and John Shroyer that's day one in the books thanks for watching see you tomorrow