live from Los Angeles it's the queues covering open-source summit North America 2017 brought to you by the Linux Foundation and redhead he welcome back everyone here live in LA for the open source summit in North America I'm jumper with my co-host Jeff Fritz too many men he'll be back shortly is out scouring the hallways for all the news and analysis getting all the scuttlebutt are here we're here with our next guest brian behlendorf who is the executive director of the hyper ledger project for the Linux Foundation thanks for coming on thank ledger thanks for sharing we just talking before the camera started rolling about blockchain and the coolness around the hype around it but again the hype cycle is usually a pretext to the trend hyper ledger is one of those exciting projects that like AI everyone is jazzed about because it's the future right open source is getting bigger and bigger as Jim zemulon was saying 23 million developers and growing but there's still so much work to be done the global society's relying on open source it's shaping our culture - Ledger's one of those things where it is going to actually disrupt the culture and change it potentially and even this morning Chinese band virtual currencies and icos and all based upon doesn't mean it's time to invest yes and whatever China bands it's always been successful so your thoughts go first boy star let's get into hyper ledger project it's certainly super exciting probably people are talking about it heavily what's going on with the project give a quick update what's the purpose who's involved and when some of the milestones you guys have hyper ledger is less than two years old it was launched officially in December of 2015 I joined in main and it was founded on the principle that hey there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the cryptocurrency world but there might be some more prosaic some more directly applicable applications of distributed ledger and smart contract technology to rebooting a lot of otherwise very thorny problems for industries in the world the main problem being you've got companies doing business with each other and the recording transactions and you know they'll have to go back and reconcile their systems to get audited bugs right and a lot of the systems out there depend upon processes at a very human processes that are prone to error prone to corruption right so the idea is the more that you can pull together you know information about transactions into a shared system of record which is really with the distributed ledger it's and then the more about of the governance and the and the business processes enclosed that you can automate by smart contract the more effective the more efficient a lot of these markets will be so that's what hyper ledger is about ok so certainly the the keynote was all about open sources being dependent upon and Jim's Emlyn as well as Christine Corbett said you know traditionally control we all know that open source but I love that the deployment changing the face of capitalism because hyper ledger is a term that you can almost apply to the notion of decentralize not just distributed but decentralized business so the notion of supply chain things in finance to moving Goods around the world this is interesting this is how about the impact of how you guys are seeing some of these applications we're now a decentralized architecture combined with distributed creates an opportunity for changing the face of capitalism flowing because the word distributed can be very loaded all right you know and even decentralized right it can be very loaded and what I what I tried to popularize is the idea of minimum viable centralization right you know football games and other sports games have referees right and when we play a game like this well sometimes you know sometimes we don't need a referee it's just us playing pick-up basketball but we want somebody on the periphery we all agree to who helps remind us what the rules are and throws a red flag from time to time all right and so you see in industries ranging from finance where you're building these transaction networks to you know supply chains where you need to track the flow of like food and to know when if food has gotten spoiled possibly where that came from or diamonds that have been involved in conflict time and you know other illegal activities right you want to know where that came for a minute and it involves that industry getting together and saying we all agree we have a big net interest in making our business actually follow certain rules and norms right and using a distributed ledger to to bring that about it's something that can just provide a lot of optimizations so most people think of like Bitcoin and ether a mezda with all this ICO buzz as de as the front end to really the underlying blockchain which you're talking about yeah and that's kind of like I get that fiat currency in this market developed to look crazed bubbles some people call it whatever but you're getting at something unique and this is that there's a real business value of hyper ledger I won't say boring but it's like meat and potatoes stuff it's like really kind of prosaic is the prosaic it's like so but it's disruptive so if you think about like the old days when we were growing up or I was growing up ERP was on mini computers and the prized resource planning relationship management software those were bloated monolithic software packages yeah still out there today and they handle the so called supply chain right so is the hypervisor a disruption to that is it an augmentation of that so some try to put it in context the cost of sending a shipping container from China to the United States right half of that is in paperwork half of that is because that container on average will go through 30 different organizations from the the you know the suppliers that you're assembling the goods into to all the different ports all the different regulatory authorities right out finally to where it's delivered and if you can optimize those business processes if you can make it so that the happen in a space where it's not about paper and facts which a lot of that world is still ruled by today or a bureaucrat sitting there reviewing stuff that's coming in and having to stamp it when really all that could be automated you could cut the cost of that and take the shipping industry from what is right now a money-losing industry to potentially being viable once again so optimization is really critical for them it's optimization but it but there's also some new capabilities here so I spent a year at Department of Health and Human Services trying to help make health care records more portable for patients right and we wrote it and got it I got the industry to write a ton of open source software implemented open standards to make these records shareable the problem was the patient wasn't involved right this was about trying to take two orgs do something that all of their bean counters told them not to do which was share patient records because no that's proprietary value and the HIPAA regulations all that not exactly blackens processes basically with blocking with blocking technology that we can reinvent that as a patient driven process right we could reinvent a lot of the other business processes out there that involve personally identifiable information like the Equifax disaster right we could reinvent how the credit markets assess risk in individuals through blockchain technology in a way that doesn't require us to build these big central anonymous third parties that Coover everybody's data and become these massive privacy titanic's right we can reinvent a lot of this through blockchain tech and that's a lot of what we're working on that Nagaraja because a analytics from that kind of a unique place because you're used to driving these big open-source projects there's a lot of people and they're trying to build the wrapper around the base core of blockchain to come up with their version or their kind of application if you will whether it be Bitcoin or whatever but you guys are in kind of a special place based on your roots we believe that I mean open standards are nice but what really matters is common code right and in a world like we envision where rather than saying you one big Network like Bitcoin or one big Network like aetherium you've got thousands or tens of thousands of these permission networks that cover different industries different geographies different regions what you need is common software so that when a developer goes to work on an application that touches one or multiple of these they've got familiar idioms to work they've got familiar technologies to work with like NGO or Java or JavaScript right but they've got a community of other technologies has been trained up on these technologies that can help them bootstrap and launch their project and maybe even become a contributor to the open source so what we've figured out at the Linux Foundation is how to make that virtuous cycle go right companies you know benefit commercially from it and then feed back into the project and that's what we're mentioning the word you get almost rethink and reimagine some of these things like the Equifax disaster yeah I think it's pretty man no breathing most tech people I really seen as as viable like absolutely it's gonna happen so there's a nice trajectory vision that people are buying into because it's somewhat you can see it hanging together playing out technically what are some of the things going on the project can you share with the folks watching about some things that you're doing to get there faster what's going on with the community with some of the issues with concerns how do people get involved take some time to go tobut deep words of the project so we're not a you know an RD kind of free thinking kind of thing we're about get writing code and shipping and getting into production right so hyper ledger fabric just hit a one dot oh that was a signal from the developers that this code is ready to be run in production systems and for you to track digital assets right doesn't by far does not mean it's the end of the road it's the end of chapter one right but at least it's a place where we you know the kind of the clear intent is let's make this actually usable by enterprises the other projects we've got eight different projects total at hyper ledger some of them even compete with each other right but we're driving all of them to get to a one dot oh and over time all of them talk about how they relate to each other in kind of complimentary ways what's some of the profile developers you're getting because some people always ask I know what should I get involved what can I sink my teeth into what are some of the meaty kind of things that people are doing with it who the persona that that are coming in these enterprise developers they more traditional full-stack developers can you give a range of some of the persona attributes because this is early code still I mean this whole space is still pretty early when it comes to understanding how to use these technologies especially at scale kind of at a DevOps scale a lot of the people first coming into the tech community now are fairly advanced right are kind of the whiz kids right but we're seeing that gradually broad broaden out we now are at a point where we could use developers coming in and writing sample applications right we could use people helping us with documentation we're developing training materials that will be creative commons-licensed so everybody will be able to deliver those and as they find bugs or add features to the training they can do that too we can really use anybody all right so folks watching get involved okay get any white spaces you might want to tease them out with that you see happening obviously mentioned tracking digital assets data is a stress that's cool anything that's going on with data probably is a digital asset but you'd agree what's some of the things that people could get motivated can you share any insight that you might have that would motivate someone to jump in I think any any industry has these challenges of weaving their systems together with other businesses and then trying to do that in a way that holds each other.you account right this is a system for building systems of record between organizations right and you know you running a database to me running a database we don't get there on our own we only get there by working with consortio by working in as a community to actually build these systems and so I'd say every every business has that challenge whether they're engineers have felt free to go in and try to tackle that extranet days when you see people building citizen networks similar concept where blockchain is one big happy family collaborative network all right final question for you kind of shooting for a little bit what do you expect to happen community any thoughts on some of the goals you have is executive director obviously you got some hackathons for good we'll see blockchain being applied to some real things with one dot out what do you see rolling out which some of your goals I massively grow the developer community both the well you know the one end of the spectrum which is the the whiz kids the hardcore developers to you know move forward on a kind of the leading edge of that but really we've got to bring you know hundred thousand developers into this space or the next couple years just to meet the demand that's there in the industry for that town alright so if I'm a now an executive as a hey I saw this great Cuban in friens awesome go get involved what how did someone get involved is just jump standard community model just jump in what advice would you give someone if they want to engage and participate for every one of our projects if you give gave it an hour you'd get to a running you know instance of that software right so fabric or sawtooth within an hour you should ever running for node instance that you can start writing chain code two which is the smart contract language right and and then from there getting involved in the community as a matter of joining mailing list joining our rocket chat channels rocket chats an alternative to slack that we actually prefer and I and I think you'll find a really welcoming community of other devs who want to tell you about what the projects are and want to help you kind of climb that learning curve one of the comments just enough good note here is that Christina gave him the key no she says code can shape culture you've been in the industry a long time you've seen the wave you've been on the shoulders of others and now as the open source goes to the next level how is code gonna shape the culture in your opinion actually people started working together to take that I would say that almost I'm not a moon shot but it's really more of an imperative that culture will be changed inclusion else is huge your thoughts on code shaping culture so we've we've had a decline in trust in institutions in the United States and worldwide not just in the last seven months since November but actually for the last 20 years there's Edelman does this survey every year where they ask you your trust in brands your trust in government your trust in the process the fairness of society and for 20 years that's been on a straight-line decline to the point where we ask ourselves like can you trust any level of government can you trust businesses to look out for your interest the answer almost generically is going to be no this is a technology that can save us from this is a technology that we I believe can help us define the rules of the game help us build society but then actually automate and implement that in a way that doesn't require us to have to bribe an official or curry favor with a school official to get our kid into that school or anything like that this is a way to try I think to make the world more accountable and more fair and open source has that inclusive and staying away from the gerrymander and I love the quote it's so confusing now it's like who do you ask where's the source of truth and it used to be RTFM and check the source code now it's not only there is no manual who is the source fake news all these bots means kind of crazy so this is that a call to arms the open source I think it is I think it really is the trust as a service ok Brian thanks so much for come on if you appreciate it Thank You director for the hyper ledger project super important project really a game changer changing the face of capitalism also continuing the trend accelerate open source I'm Shaun Frechette for more live coverage from the queue after this short break