Command Line Heroes - Days of Future_Open

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Imagine a world where open source never caught on, where no one thought it’d be a good idea to make source code available to anyone. In this episode, we imagine this bizarre possibility. And we celebrate the open source tools and methodologies that got us where we are today. Join us as we wrap up Season 1, an almost 30,000-foot view of how the open source world came to be. Next season, we’re zooming in and focusing on the epic struggles of today’s command line heroes. Please let us know what you think of the show by providing a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. Drop us a line at redhat.com/commandlineheroes, we're listening...

In a world without open source, enforcers from the future travel back through time to destroy Linus Torvald's computer. Ah! Oh, man. I had that nightmare again. The one where I've got these amazing ideas, but I can't develop them because there's no open source tech to work with. I think a world without open source open source tech to work with. I think a world without open source is almost bound to be evil. If software had been closed in the 1980s and the source code had never been opened up again, I think that there would be a lot less innovation for sure.

It would be a backward world. I think there'd certainly be fewer smart refrigerators. In a world without smart refrigerators. Okay, okay, you get the point. We're imagining a world without open source technology, and it's not very appealing. So picture it, your online life managed and taxed by a few megalithic proprietary companies, gatekeepers at every part of the road. For us developers, a world without open source would mean far less freedom

and influence. All season long, we've been tracking the role of developers in an open source world. Our work has been evolving and expanding with the growth of the open source tools and techniques that make our work possible. Whether it's the Agile Manifesto, the rise of DevOps, or container orchestration, the power and freedom we've claimed for ourselves is tied to that philosophy of open source.

In our season finale, we're taking a step back and looking at how far we've come. As the world goes open source, how true to the original meaning of that term can we remain? And where are we headed next? I'm Saran Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Episode 7, Days of Future Open. A world without open source is not a world that I would want to live in, nor do I think it is a world that the vast majority of people out there would want to live in. This is Stephen Von Nichols.

You might remember him from episodes one and two when we were talking about the OS wars. He's a contributing editor at CBS Interactive, and he's been following tech since 300 bits per second was a fast modem. You may not be able to name a single open source program other than Linux, but your current life is a life built on open source. Most of us can't really go online without using open source tech. It's in almost every supercomputer on the planet. It's running the Internet of Things.

It's in your phone, your web server, your social media, and oh yeah, it's running the Large Hadron Collider too. And we developers aren't the only ones who figured out the benefits of this stuff. Open source attitudes are now spreading beyond technology to influence other industries like economics, music, science, journalism. What if an architect shared the blueprint for a building in the same way we share code? What if a reporter opened up her files and let anyone scrutinize not just her published article, but her research and interview notes?

It shouldn't surprise us. The philosophy that developers have been nurturing for years, the idea that everyone gets to see and comment on the code, copy it, offer fixes. It's actually a pretty fundamental thing, right? It's sharing. Ever since the earliest humans were sharing recipes for meals, we've known that openly sharing sets of instructions, algorithms in other words, has a net benefit for humanity. In some ways,

open source technologies are now allowing us to get back to that basic truth. I think that like more things being open source kind of facilitates and like encourages people to go back and consult primary sources, which is always good. That's Hannah Cushman. She's a developer at Datamate, where they've been trying to make our cities more open. Reams of open data from governments get compiled and made sensible so ordinary citizens can actually use it and take action. The tech they use is open source, but so is their attitude about politics.

We did a project here in Chicago with an organization called City Bureau where we were working with them to get at lead test results for the public schools. So the Chicago public schools went through and tested, if not all, a significant portion of the water fixtures in all of their schools, and published the results of those tests as a series of more than 500 PDFs. So that's great, but it's not exactly an effective way of making data open. It was really difficult to see, you know, where lead was found across the system in like higher numbers. Or we used another open source tool called Tabula,

which you can run from your terminal to extract data from over 500 PDFs and put it all together and help put this huge like dump of information into a context that was useful for people. I think being able to consult that source data is a really powerful way for people to kind of understand where information is coming from and verify that it is in fact correct. Citizens can access the details of health reports, data on lobbyists. They get to look at the whole engine of city politics, and Datamate opens the hood. That means the people of Chicago have a better chance at bringing about the changes

they want to see. Carol Willing, a research software engineer over at Cal Poly, thinks that this expanding open source attitude is the start of something much larger. Personally, I think that we're going to evolve beyond open source software to open hardware, to open government, to open education, open collaboration, innovation, like so. I think it's going to continue to evolve. Open source is starting to look more like a law of nature than just some outgrowth of the tech world.

People have been charitable and giving of their time freely for thousands of years. So that's nothing new. What has changed the world profoundly is the ability for groups to work together to build something bigger than what they could build on their own. I love this idea, taking some very new tech and using it to get back to some very old ideals. But before we get too excited, definitions can get wobbly as more and more folks start calling themselves open source. It starts meaning something that's just free or something that's crowdsourced or even just something that's customizable. For example, if I let you choose what kind of sprinkles go on your ice cream. That's not necessarily an open-source dessert. But if I show you how to make your own sprinkles, let you improve on my sprinkle recipe, and then give you my blessing if you wanted to share that secret with others,

now that's some tasty open-source right there. So what was that original definition again? It's pretty simple, but we should keep repeating it. To be truly open source, you need code, or a blueprint, or a recipe. In other words, some kind of raw data that anyone can study, change, and redistribute at will. It's a philosophy that's just starting to revolutionize the world beyond our command lines. It's a really phenomenal way to do technology, and I'm thrilled to death that it has been as successful as it has been, and that I've gotten to be a part of it. Thomas Cameron has been involved in open source since before the term was coined in 1998. Today, he's a senior principal cloud evangelist at Red

Hat. He's perfectly positioned to talk about how far open source has come, but also how many battles were fought along the way. And man, there was huge pushback. You know, managers didn't want to take on the risk because, well, it's free. There's no one that I can pick up the phone and call for support. I have to depend on you.

But we won a lot of these sort of easy fights. You know, the departmental servers or divisional servers or a small web server or a small file and print server. And over time, after winning these easier fights, the tougher ones came along. And with every single one of those, you saw sysadmins and systems engineers become more enamored of open source. Despite these battles, you couldn't deny the ongoing progress. with, you know, household names, Intel, IBM, AMD, you know, every organization you can imagine has started contributing to open source projects. And it was absolutely a fight. You know, there

were so many arguments I had at various enterprise positions that I held, where I said, you know, we need to introduce Linux or other open source technologies into the data center. Thomas sees that open source software development is taking over, but for some people, that's pretty unsettling. We're able to share information and analysis. And so that scares folks who historically have been the ones to hold information and derive value from it, you know, whether it's charging money or just having control of an organization. It's a huge change, and with that comes fear. The open source rebels that we described at the start of this season

have now become industry leaders. But that's not the end of the story. Not by a long shot. Chris Tazi is the senior editor at Fixate.io. He sees open source disruption as the start of a fundamental shift in the way people everywhere, not just software, are going to work together. I think that one of the things that has made open source so powerful over the last two decades is this continued interest in decentralization. I think this also speaks to how open source has influenced other technological

innovations, things like blockchain, which is also founded centrally on the idea that databases, for example, or transactions could be more efficient or could be more secure if they're decentralized, if we get away from centralized modes of production. And again, open source, I think today, and ever since Torvalds came along, has been about decentralization of development labor, basically. That decentralization across the board means the whole world's going open source.

The developers who embody that philosophy, they're the ones who have the best shot at imagining that future. Here's Tristram Oten. He's a developer based in London, and he's definitely thinking about that long game. It looks like 3D printers are going to make our lives easier and hopefully more ecologically sound

by producing parts at home. Whenever something breaks, you could just make it at home. It's the ideal Star Trek replicator future that we were promised so very long ago. Hopefully that will come into place so that entire houses perhaps could be open source. Tristram imagines a world where open source is the rule of the land and that means developers become if not gurus then at least guides really critical guides in the future our role as developers is going to become increasingly more and more important and it's going to get increasingly more and more like wizards, if it isn't already.

Okay. Wizards. We'll be wizards. You know, we speak strange languages that make these machines do wonderful things, and we're paid a lot of money to be the court wizard or the company wizard. And when there are devices in everyone's bodies, and when there are devices everywhere that are internet accessible and can be remote controlled it's going to be very important that we as a as a group as a guild act in best faith that the medical profession has a charter to do no harm and and so forth i think as developers we need to collectively decide that we're not going to build the killer robots. We're not going to build spying software into everybody's routers and

everybody's hearing aids. We need to assure each other and assure everyone that we're going to work for the greater good and not against humanity. Let's all just promise right now that we won't build killer robots. Okay? Okay. And beyond that, I do think Tristram's onto something. In some ways, we developers have seen the future. And that means we've got a chance to help shape it.

What are the ethics of open source development going to look like in 10 years? We're in a supremely privileged position and it's up to us to do the right thing. So, Wizards, where are we heading? Can we conjure up a healthy future for open source?

I wanted to talk with someone who's done some deep thinking about all this. And I found her. Safia Abdallah is a software engineer who's been making open source contributions to the Interact project. We started imagining what a real, sustainable, broad-reaching open source world could look like. Have a listen. When you think about the future of open source and what that looks like, what are some differences that we might see? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest emerging trends that I'm seeing is a lot of focus on open source sustainability, which is the discussion around how do you keep open source projects that are

crucial to the entire tech ecosystem well-maintained and well-updated throughout their lifetime. And I think there's been a lot of interesting progress in that space. Safia got me thinking, how much better could our work become? How much would change if we could build that sustainable approach she's describing? If corporations were contributing time, code, and resources. So I asked her, how do you see that impacting the actual products we create and the tools that we build. The sad reality is that when you don't have the focus and time and energy and money to build something well for everyone, what you tend to do is just build it well for yourself. Absolutely. And so you build a product that ostracizes a lot of individuals. So I believe that if we discover a more sustainable model for open source,

we're actually going to start building software that's accessible to individuals who might be blind or hard of hearing or disabled in other ways. Interesting. Yeah, I really like that. Okay, so when you think about how the principles and processes and the culture and community and all those things you mentioned of open source might be applied to industries outside of technology, outside of software development. What are some fields that you think could really benefit from open source? And where do you think open source might show up next? Oh, that's a really interesting observation. The immediate answer that comes to me is an open source mindset in the science community and open science. And I think the realization is that when you share software in an open fashion, what you're sharing is not the literal lines of

code. Well, that is what you're sharing. But the other thing that you're sharing on top of that is knowledge and details about how to do something. So what you're really sharing is knowledge. And that translates really directly to the scientific world where researchers will spend a lot of time exploring a particular topic and then publish a research paper on it. And I think focusing on an open science initiative that makes sure that researchers are producing work that's accessible to all people, understandable by all people, and shareable and extendable by all people is going to improve society's understanding of science and how far we can push research forward. But I was in college, I did biochemistry research, and I was very much used to this passion for experimenting, for researching, for trying new things, but at the same time,

still being very protective over your discoveries because you need to be a published author. Like you need credit. You know, that is a huge, huge part of moving up in academia. So when we're talking about bringing these open source principles of sharing and contributing and putting out, you know, unfinished products out there and hoping other people will fill it in, how do you see those principles possibly colliding in other industries where people might be more protective? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that touches on a way hairier, bigger problem. For open source to be successful, the motivations and the incentives have to be for the most part extrinsic. You can't rely on systems that encourage people to focus on their own goals and motivations at the expense of others

and at the expense of the greater good of society. I think at a fundamental level, we have to restructure the way we see a lot of things and the way a lot of systems work to have them focus on the collective good instead of the singular good. It's hard to do. It's hard to undo systems like tenure, which have a lot of negative repercussions at universities. And it's hard to undo other incentive systems that can harm the planet, can harm other people, can harm progress as a society. But starting to adopt an open source mindset and taking the initiative to begin to undo those systems will go a long way. Absolutely. So if you could recreate open source in its entirety from scratch,

you could build it all over again, what would your version of open source look like? Oh boy. The first thing that I would change about open source is its public relations and its image. I would probably attempt to build an open source culture or community that didn't issue that perception that you had to be elite or a fantastic developer in order to thrive and succeed. And that was one of the biggest things that deterred me. The other big thing I would focus on is open source sustainability

and increasing corporate accountability and the on is open source sustainability and increasing corporate accountability and the health of open source systems. I think one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of really popular technology companies and platforms that people use are mostly comprised of open source. Like how many Rails web applications are super profitable and successful now? And I think it's important for us to ensure that those corporations have a stewardship to the open source community and recognize where their value is and contribute it back. Okay, so in Safia's open source, we'll call it SOS.

Oh yeah. We have corporate accountability and corporations contributing to the sustainability of open source. We have contributors and maintainers possibly being paid themselves for the work that they do and generally a more loving and open brand for what open source is. Yeah. Sounds like a great version of open source. I like it. Thank you. Safia Abdallah is a software engineer and a contributor to the Interact project. She's part of a new generation of developers, but even she's coming at it

with the expectation of open source by default. So I want to give a shout out to that new army of command line heroes. You all are going to show us the future. You're living it right now. You're going to lead the charge. Now, as excited as I am for the open source revolution, I don't want to be a Pollyanna either. There are going to be challenges.

The bigger open source gets, the more we have to make sure that it's actually sustainable. Have we honestly figured out a scalable way of maintaining open source projects? I mean, the Linux kernel's got some contributors who are full-time employees, but most of the open source projects out there are still maintained by volunteers. The work of open source isn't over just because we've graduated from rebel status. Multi-billion dollar companies are running on Linux. Open source pioneers are now tech leaders. We need to track this trajectory and try to imagine what comes next.

In particular, what could go wrong? Chris Tazi describes how open source, once the disruptor, is now vulnerable to disruption itself. The open source revolution is not over because it's not as if the challenges are going to stop coming. Even though today, you know, basically everybody on the planet who uses the computer is using open source in one way or another. That doesn't mean that open source is necessarily totally safe from disruption, especially from the perspective of people who are committed to the original goals of the open source communities, which things like cloud computing really complicate in certain ways. How open source will open source be?

Chris mentioned cloud computing, and in episode six, we described how becoming reliant on somebody else's data center definitely complicates the original goals of open source. It's tricky territory, and we're still learning the lay of the land. As we move forward,

we're going to have to remind ourselves about our roots. Every young rebel needs that Obi-Wan hologram moment. Will they get a reminder from the past? Here's ours. Linus Torvalds once said, in real open source, you have the right

to control your own destiny. If developers help to encourage that spirit in the bigger world, that's a pretty good job. So, this is the final episode of Season 1. Can you believe it? This season just flew by. Before working on this podcast, things like DevOps, Agile, and Cloud, I didn't really think about where they came from and who made them. I never thought they had homes with teams and talent that cared for them

and helped them grow. They were just a bunch of tools in my toolbox. But that's not how I see them now. They're not just random tools. They're a part of the landscape I live in. A landscape the developers who came before me have been shaping for decades. Now, I get to help shape what comes next. That's amazing. Amazing. Season one may be coming to a close, but good news. We're already working on season two.

Over these past seven episodes, we focused on the open source tools and methodologies that brought us to where we are today. Sort of like the 30,000 foot view view of how the open-source world came to be. In Season 2, we're going to zoom in and focus on the epic struggles of today's command-line heroes. We get to tag along each episode and see how developers on the ground are challenging the norm. These are the real-life stories that shape the future of our industry.

And while we hunt those stories down, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us, what's your command line story? What epic open-source battles have you been waging? Go to redhat.com slash commandlineheroes to drop your story. We're listening. While you're there, you might want to check out the lineup

for the 2018 Red Hat Summit, happening in San Francisco May 8th through 10th. Three days of breakout sessions, hands-on labs, and keynotes, including one from yours truly, all about open source. Hope to see you there. Command Line Heroes is an original podcast from Red Hat. To get all of the episodes from season one delivered to your device for free, and to get notified for the start of season two, make sure to subscribe to the show. Just search for Command Line Heroes in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Pocket Cast, Stitcher, CastBox, or however you get your podcasts. I'm Saran Yatbarik. Thanks for listening,

and keep on coding. Thank you. But these days, it's coming. In fact, containers are a big part of the future vision of software-defined vehicles. And look, if we can get the container revolution to work in cars, then everything a cloud-native developer can do today can apply to cars. This huge ecosystem of engineers can start to write applications for automotive. We can completely change the industry. This is why Red Hat's open-source approach to edge computing is so important. The way we collaborate, the way we build together, it's already making some pretty incredible things possible.

Learn more about them at redhat.com slash edge.