"Selling" Open Source

It might seem paradoxical to want to "sell" open source, but lo these many years into the open source revolution, many organizations have yet to get the message.  Listen in as  James Genus helps us make sense of it all, giving us the insights we need to convince the laggards to get onboard.

WARNING: The audio for this episode can only be described as . . . horrible.  Even so, the magical interview with James went so very well that it would be a crime to consign it to the bin, so thanks for your forbearance.  We'll certainly do better in the future!

ABOUT: Microsoft Principal Cloud Solution Architect James Genus Jr. has been working in the technology field for over 20 years. Working across multiple industries including manufacturing, construction, research and technology, open source solutions have been trusted companions helping to solve technical and business challenges.

LINKS: OpenSource.net, Open Source Blog (Microsoft), Open Source Initiative

CREDITS: Louis Berman (Host); James Genus (Guest); Dan Phillipson / PremiumBeat (Music); Anne Lamb (Intro/Outro); East Coast Studio (Editing)

MORE: visit https://azuresuccess.buzzsprout.com/ for additional episodes, plus transcripts, and more ways to listen to the show. As to your comments and suggestions, please feel free to email your host, Louis Berman, at lberman@microsoft.com

Transcript

James Genus: 0:01

It's easy to pay money and take. That's easy to do you grow once more from contributing. So if you're really talking about business becoming better open source allows you that practice of contributing, not just consuming, allows you to become a better organization.

Intro: 0:23

You're listening to Azure success, the podcast by and for Azure professionals. Listen in, and you'll be sure to speak to your customers March into the cloud. And now your host, Louis Berman.

Louis S. Berman: 0:37

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Azure success. I'm Louis Berman, your host, and I'm really pleased today To be with James Jennis jr. He's a principal cloud solutions architect. I'm just a senior cloud solutions architect, which means James can probably tell me what to do in the school room and other stuff. We'll ask him what that is. I've looked up what Janice means. It means a principal taxonomic category that ranks above species and below family, and is denoted by capitalized Latin name, example Leo with a capital L and I can assure you, he should rank above me and lots of other people. Great guy, very, very knowledgeable at open source. When you say hi, James, say hi, Deborah, thank you for having me here.

James Genus: 1:26

He's a great guy though. Super, super, super knowledgeable about his topic. And so today's topic is selling open source. Not to be granted. I made the thing up as sort of a catchy thing, but the whole idea of Azure success is we talk about the walk. Why and how basically what is the thing in this case open source, why it should be interesting to ourselves and our customers, and finally how to get our customers and ourselves to adopt it and our colleagues. So James, what is open source? I don't know if there is, that's a good question. Open source is actually more of a process. Open source is a way of inviting people to actually contribute. So instead of just going somewhere and buying or using what someone else created that functionality or to like contribute to that process, to improve the, that product might be software. It could be different form of the legal system. It's not necessarily just the, of we're talking about software open source. Yeah. Very, very cool. And I want to quote you, there was a time quote unquote, when you said if correct open source into your organization, you get fired, right? So that feels old school to me, but it's like, there's still some late in fear. I'm using open source. Ooh, bad. So I will date myself. I've been using computers for a long time, early on and no really in order to use something to pad a computer, you have to actually have significant material resources. Computers were not cheating. Software was not cheap. And so the open source movement came about because in lots of ways, people didn't have the personal funds to buy software, so they wouldn't be there. And then they would share that. So the challenge that comes with that for businesses is there's some problem with the software and your business is running on that software and you lose money at least in the beginning, who do you call to have those? Right? And so that's the reason why early on in my career, you didn't openly use open source software. And so we'll talk about the late eighties, early nineties, when you were about four years old, I believe, right? The camps that people live in were pretty well defined. The Microsoft camp, you have Apple camp IBM, right? You might've had some depth stuff, whatever the, what was popular back then use those groups. Didn't really always work together. People were pretty firm in where they stood. Let's put it that way. So that's why using open source for something like Linux, right? I worked at a software company and I needed to have another computer, but they wouldn't provide one for me. So I use a living spiritual machine to run my database so that the application could actually be shown, interacting from a windows machine, talking to a Linux machine and the, my sequel database, right. Improve the application to work as designed. They found out about it after I had done it, I didn't ask them permission to do it. I just did it. We moved forward. So I lucked out there. Is it fair to say that in the modern world, it's no longer a pejorative, right? It's just, the software is important. Not necessarily that it is open versus not if it's good software. That's great. If it's open, that makes you feel better probably, but it's a sweater that's ultimately being produced. Is that right? Or am I missing something? It is the software, but it's also the hardware, right? So the open source approach can be used from both, right? So let's take the example of data centers in the past. And if you go back far enough, you would hire really smart engineers that can do very specific things. So when you actually bought different hardware, you got different capabilities and you could make the argument. There was a reason to do that. Going back to the seventies and eighties, the nineties, early parts of the two thousands come up and he'd say, you know what? It's really expensive to engineer hardware that way, not only is it expensive, I can't find enough smart people to do this work. So if I can start using something that's more open and I can share, I can open up a project on data center design and people collaborate and share. Then we can all end up with a solution that jokes butter over time. And we can all learn from each other. And for businesses, they don't necessarily have to hire the people in the opensource community. Although oftentimes that does happen, right? So if I love doing server design a certain way, and I'm contributing to this open source community, then I might get called by a computer manufacturer, right? James, you're doing this stuff. We'd like to offer you a job here, keep working in the open source community. So it can be for hardware and it can be for software. But the idea is we all share. We all contribute. We all improve over time. That's a very different model. It's a very different model that was saying like, I just want all this stuff to be like, all right, are all Microsoft, all that was it right

Speaker 3: 7:18

Now, of course, open source ranges in scale. Right? So I've contributed to a bunch of open source projects. I've created open source projects, my own, as well as the pull request, or we didn't even call them pull requests in the early days, just adding code to things. So one of the things I like about it best of course, is that I get to get my toe in. And very often it's an actress, the big project with a big quotes around it, you know, an operating system or word processor stuff, but it's a little utility or as a developer for me, I find it really important to have libraries that actually compose my applications from. So can you talk about the various scales that opensource lives at?

James Genus: 8:01

That's a really good observation. At least in this day and age and people can start from the beginning was sharing and it might be something really simple. Like one time I was doing something was an actual project, started out as closed source and proprietary. And they were moving to an open source model. I happened to find a monk somewhere. I found the bug, I reported the bug and I could've gone the other way and not done anything. Right. But if you're talking about contributing and making the process better, I notified the creators of the bug. And then later on, they were like, James did such and such, right. But I became a contributor, not just a consumer. And it wasn't a huge contribution either. It was just like maybe they needed to do so versus not necessarily. But the idea was it was a very small contribution that I could do. So I contributed to this product. That's the same principle of those that you might do with your libraries, right? You may share your libraries and someone in New Jersey or someone in Mumbai or someone in Tokyo may say, you know what I like what Louis is doing, but I needed to do this. Let me contribute it to the project. And as you own the product Louis, you decide whether or not it gets incorporated. And assuming it does, then all of a sudden you're getting the benefit. Your project is getting the benefit of the thinking of other humans, which means the potential for that project to better serve a population increases. That's the real value of open source.

Speaker 3: 9:36

I've always been a fan of open source with little letters, right. And stuff, anything technology with little letter. So my favorite thing with open source quite frankly, is the fact that more and more documentation is going open source now. And so I like to correct documentation, like we're doing an open hack training today, myself and Eric colleague, James Vega, one Vega, excuse me, st. James. I have James on the mind. So we're doing a project. And today we discovered a bunch of problems with the projects that we're doing. And we would love love to be able to contribute to the documentation of an in this particular case. There was no way to do that. But we had a conversation with the group of people who are putting it together, who thinks that's a great idea, and that they're going to support that in the future. So I like it. That's why open sources, but let's talk about why it's important and useful for your, from yourself, whatever organization level you're at, why you should adopt open source and why you should potentially do it broadly. Like Microsoft, like Microsoft people usually don't think of us as an open source company, but we have more open source repositories than any other company in the world participating in open source, more than any other company in the world. Why should your company not Microsoft be part of it?

James Genus: 10:57

Well, thank you for sharing that. Because part of the reason that I came to Microsoft, I actually used to work with red hat. I was told that I did not have to leave my open source experience to come to Microsoft. And so if we go back, historically those camps were pretty well fixed, right? Not paid. And those are cultural differences, but Microsoft changed its direction. And part of the reason is that open source means like I keep coming back to this. Lots of people around the globe can contribute. There's no way that Microsoft's going to know if someone in Namibia right, or Brazil may be able to solve the problem. If it's closed source, we know they can contribute. We know that we will lose out on the brilliant minds of other humans on the planet. So why would a business use open source for the very same reasons, right? You get the potential for a better solution to a business challenge or problem. And you get the benefit. Someone else may have already been challenged with the same challenge. You have got a way to move past it. So you don't have to create the wheel yourself. You can just use that or you can contribute to it and improve the situation for someone else. Right. There is the value. Now there are lots of places where I've worked in the past. That would say, you know what? We don't have a legal requirement to use open source or to even pay for open source. That's kind of how I ended up at red hat. I wasn't gonna argue with them at the time I have been using Linux so long and it had provided so much value. I needed to contribute back to the company that made that possible. So I went to work for red hat and it is this aspect of not just, it's easy to pay money and take. That's easy to do you grow once more from contributing. So if you're really talking about food, becoming better open source allows you that practice of not just consuming, allows you to, from a better organization. That sounds great. Do you have a favorite piece of open source? Well, I love Linux, so that's probably as an operating system. So that's what I use the most. And actually most of the innovation that you see happening globally is because of the Lennox kernel. The fact that it was shared with the world community, right? The fact that somebody in New Hampshire mad dog decided to host that code in New Hampshire university of New Hampshire. So the rest of the world's gonna have access to this work, that alone. I love that. That's cool. So I'm a programmer at heart. And so my favorite open source product of all time has gotta be Rosalyn I program in C sharp and two, be able to look in the innards of the.net compiler, or it's called the Pilar platform. I guess Roslyn is no longer the active name we're supposed to use with it, but it is really, really changed my world. So this is great. So we have a sense of the watch and why, yeah. Let's talk about the, how do we sort of spread this? How do we convince others? How do we help them get on the bandwagon? There are several ways to do it. I know in my personal experience, the, how I did it was to actually do it myself, shared what I had done with other people and let them see that it was possible because for lots of people, they didn't believe that these things can work, right. There was this culture that we have to do proprietary for everything and working together is not the way forward. So I would say, first of all, you can show my example. What's possible. Thus, really the best teacher is the example. What does that mean for an individual then oftentimes means you need to get involved in some sort of open source community to start contributing to that community. And then as you contribute and are using the contributions that you made, then maybe comes the example that other people can see. And I always start with really small things that are not mission critical because is it can do this and prove it works there. Well, they can probably work somewhere else pretty well too. And then you take small steps forward. I oftentimes think that in major, anything that grows really fast to live a long time. So if you really want something to last a long time, it can grow slowly. You nurture it, you take care of it, right? You make sure that it has what it needs to survive because of the same thing happens in business. Start with a small project, get some success, right? And then once you have that success, then you can move that to other places. This sort of matches the ethos in a way, right. Start small. Do it yourself, get your hands dirty. Yeah, start small. Do it yourself. Share task four contributors. That's it. That's great for a guy like me who likes to get his hands dirty. What if you're a top office, sorta guy, a CEO, CFO, those people that this is the right way to go. It was much more difficult 20 years ago to convince them that it was the way to go. And in fact, 20 years ago, they didn't believe that it was the path. And so even though their businesses may have been running on open source, they just didn't believe it. So how do I convince them? I go and talk to these executives about what it is to be part of a community and how really, what we're talking about is how are we helping each other learn and grow and be better over time. Because if we do that, the business gets better. The individuals and the business gets better, right? If we just stay where we are, life moves on around us. It's not like we don't grow anymore. It's almost as if, if you don't consciously start participating, you cease to exist. You you'd cease to have relevance. And I think that belief that we can be passive in life as opposed to being active, right, a CEO or an executive can actively encourage their staff to participate in these communities and they can actually help. So project better serve the business needs. So that's how I frame these discussions. Right? You can wait for stuff to happen to you, or you can actually go out and participate in it, make it what you needed to be, be active. I like that as a theme just for life period. Great. I was going to sort of hijack you and ask you to tell me something clever and put you on the spot, but you've already just said it, learn and grow and get better together over time. I really liked that concept. So it's not just technical, right? It is processes If you will.

Speaker 3: 17:50

So I liked that this has been really great. I appreciate it. Do you want to leave us with any final words you've spoken to on it? So, well, I don't know if there's anything more to say, but I'd love to hear anything more you'd like to say.

James Genus: 18:00

I would just like to say thank you, Louis. No one's ever asked me these questions in this way before. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share. I really don't think about necessarily how I got to where I am in life, but it was really the open source model, which was you work together with people and actively try to find ways to collaborate. So thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 3: 18:22

You're very much welcome. So I'm talking with James Shanice, jr. Principal cloud solution, architecture, Microsoft and expert on open source. And here's where I would normally put in the tagline, but this podcast is new and I haven't really sort of anything clever to say. So I'm going to say, just insert clever thing here and thank you for listening.

Speaker 2: 18:41

Beautiful. You've been listening to Azure success, the podcast by and for Azure professionals, you can visit our website, asher-success.com for show notes, helpful links and other episodes, but also to leave your questions, comments, and suggestions. Thank you for listening.