About
Today I talked with Jeffrey Borek who’s the word-wide Program Director for Open Technology & Developer Advocacy at IBM.
Jeff has worked in open source for the past 20 years and is currently the head of IBM’s open source program office. Needless to say, he has seen firsthand how open source has evolved. In this episode, Jeff covers the four waves of evolution for open source software and talks about open source business models and how IBM is monetizing open source today.
Transcript
hey everybody welcome back to the 21st episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams my name is
henry badry and today i talked with jeffrey barek who’s the worldwide program director for open technology
and developer advocacy at ibm jeff has worked in open source for the past 20 years and is currently the head of
ibm’s open source program office needless to say he has seen firsthand
how open source has evolved over the past 20 years and in this episode he covers
the four waves of evolution and also talks about open source business models and how
ibm is monetizing open source software today whether you are a user developer
manager or just curious about the industry open teams is the place to find the information news
training and support you need to thrive with open source software now that the introductions are out of
the way let’s get into it [Music]
jeff thanks so much for joining me on the podcast hey happy to be here henry so you’ve been at ibm for the past 24
years and i’d say you definitely qualify as a true ibm through and through but
before joining ibm you run a startup that was acquired by a t so can you talk a bit about your journey
from this point through to today sure well um again my background’s in
uh engineering and then i went back and got a an mba business degree because i’ve always
sort of like to have that balance of focusing on the technical but also you know what are the practical
ramifications of what you’re what the business is trying to accomplish and i worked for a mobile
operator before coming to ibm back when part smartphones were not nearly anything like that smart they were
actually analog devices the original cellular system was all analog
and so i had a great you know time at that startup and
it did give me a great appreciation though for the difference between you know people that could operate
technology versus people that could build technology right and the company i work for macaw cellular was very innovative
company but most of the other communications companies back then were more
what i would call swiss watch winders not so much swiss watch builders and so
when the former att long distance company acquired the wireless startup i worked for my
standing joke was that you know i didn’t want to work for a large bureaucratic organization so i left went to ibm but it was
actually a great time to join ibm because ibm was then coming out of
another struggle period that they’ve had and ibm’s a company that’s over 100 years old there
aren’t that many companies that you know survive that long so it is a testament that ibm’s been able to
reinvent itself not not just once but several times and lou gerschner was getting things back on
track and uh again i had an appreciation for the fact that ibm was a technology company and that it
really you know was doing some very clever things at the time and without going into a huge amount of
my history uh the short version is that i i’ve worked
for again over 24 years but i really had sort of three different
um focus areas over that period the great thing about a larger company
is that you know you can kind of reinvent yourself and do something different every three to five years and
you know work in a different part of the business and i always also like to say i’ve kind
of been attracted to the pointy end of the spear and you know what the interesting thing
about that is you tend to you end up arriving first but sometimes you run into the immovable object
and certainly trying to do early wireless data at my former employer was pretty
challenging back when the infrastructure was analog but at ibm my first third was
essentially working in the telecommunications industry for ibm engaging
both my former employer as well as the cable properties and cable was emerging as a big
opportunity area as well and i did that successfully for about seven years or so and then i
actually as during that time became part of the att integrated account team you know focused
back on the large long distance company based in you know then the new york new jersey
area but when i pivoted to the second chapter of my career it was really starting to focus more on software
and uh hardware from uh not just engaging with our clients but
you know what how are we going to continue to grow ibm as a company and i took a my first corporate strategy
job doing cross-platform linux strategy so you know what’s the benefit of running linux on the mainframe you know linux on
unix machines and of course linux on x86 where it all started so that was really a great pivot for me
because i i went from not knowing ibm to kind of becoming immersed into ibm
and um the challenge another challenging thing i think about especially in larger business companies is that
it can be so challenging to understand the larger organization that you lose sight of
what’s happening outside and the rest of the ecosystem so i um that’s when i first again got
introduced to open source and learned a bit more about some of the really savvy things ibm did in open
source in the early days most people recall that it was around 2000 when ibm said it was investing a
billion dollars in linux and um you know that was certainly a smart thing that ibm did
back when most people thought linux was sort of a college uh students you know experiment
to try and create a unix type operating system that would run on x86 architecture
but ibm also supported the creation of the apache foundation ibm actually helped
write some of the bylaws and provide a healthy start to what’s now become a great institution
in open source the apache foundation and then lastly ibm helped to found
eclipse the unified software development ide
for initially focused on java and the reason ibm wanted to do that was
that back in that era you had sun and bea
and web logic and other companies trying to create a vibrant market place for
developers and application development around java and the alternative back then was you know microsoft saying hey
you know it’s it’s all from one vendor it all works together it’s all easy and so providing a common
platform to try and unify the java ecosystem was a smart thing and uh but i started to get concerned
about ibm’s activities in the cloud space right because if you go back and look at you know 2010 which
seems like ancient history now but that was when amazon was starting to prove some traction in trying to provide
public cloud as an alternative to customers using their own data center and at that time you know a lot of
people don’t realize it but even you know bomber when he was running microsoft you know realized that
you know public cloud was an opportunity for them as well and the thing that made it easy for them
to get engaged was that neither aws amazon nor microsoft had sort of a
legacy business to keep it occupied and defend or protect right and ibm’s bread and butter was hey we
make hardware so you can buy hardware from us we make enterprise software happy to provide that and we also do all
sorts of services to help you with software and hardware and that kind
of approach you know was a very successful model for ibm for the last 20 years plus since i
joined it but it was really clear to me that when i took a role in cloud and this was again 2012 half the
industry was saying cloud is all about private cloud so cloud in your data center and
the you know amazon and a few others were saying no it’s really going to be more about public cloud
and amazon was you know a early leader but for me in 2014 it was a realization
that no customers are really going to you know customers don’t care about this argument between traditional vendors and amazon
whether it’s private or whether it’s public they were going to decide for themselves
where they would land along that spectrum right and mix and match and both idc and gartner’s data showed
that both public and private were both growing at double-digit you know keggers compound
average growth rates and so the debate didn’t make sense because there would be you could choose both and customers
would want to choose for themselves not be told by vendors what to do and so therefore
i wrote a blog back in 2014 on the value of hybrid cloud and it became the most popular piece
uh in the ibm forbes website that year it got over 17 000 hits which was a pretty big number
for ibm back in that day it’s still a decent number today but success in that cloud space got me
into my current role and what i do today for ibm is i work in open technologies and i also run the
open source program office at ibm and it’s interesting because a lot of
it kind of flies under the radar but you might be surprised to learn that you know we enable you know ibm
currently today has some 350 000 employees worldwide
our group touches about 80 000 of those employees every year because we have open source
annual certification so if you’re working in open source we want you to take this annual review to make sure
that you know you’re dotting your eyes and crossing your t’s we also do these internal webcasts similar to what
we’re doing here where we uh make ibmers aware of open source projects that are happening
in ibm or other things they should be aware of and then we also uh i go
out to the various ibm labs and engage with the people that are working there because
clearly open source was becoming a real force in the industry about six or seven years
ago and it was really important that ibm start to get really engaged and
the critical thing back at that point was that i’d be on a good reputation but ibm just wasn’t as visible you know
we were kind of again flying under the radar but for example if i told you that two years
ago we cleared over 400 000 open source packages as part of a review process to
build open source as part of our offerings that sounds like a great number well
that was 2019 and 2020 we cleared over 512 000
open source packages so we we both consume and contribute back to open
source in a balanced way to try and ensure that
you know ibm is not just uh helping to take advantage of the innovation that’s
happening out in open source but to effectively contribute back to make sure that we’re we want to be
good members of the communities in which we work right definitely and i think ibm was probably one of the first to
be willing to contribute to a lot of these communities because they saw the value in it and that’s kind of the enterprise open source strategy approach
that i think a lot of companies are taking today but it’s been really interesting to hear you’ve you’ve definitely been at the forefront of this evolving
landscape which is open source and so i’m curious to know in the past 20 years
how have you seen open source evolve well it’s really been interesting i i typically look at what i call the four
waves of open source and the first way was all about individuals and whether it was
a software developer or an entrepreneur somebody who
saw the potential of open source a lot of it in the early days was just individuals and a lot of passion
around convictions of what was right you know some people viewed it as almost
like a religious thing of a kind that you know software should be free
and other people had a more pragmatic well you know there’s a role for free software but
you know there’s also a role for companies to find ways to make money off software
right and uh famously bill gates you know back in the 70s wrote this
note to the industry saying paraphrasing you know stop passing around free software or none of us are ever going to
make any you know living in this industry right but you know sharing software has been happening
as long as there have been computers and the second wave of open source was when
companies like ibm took notice and i mentioned back in 2000 we supported linux
but it wasn’t just ibm there were other companies like hp and others that saw the value
of the potential and you could almost think of early open source was sort of like doing fundamental research in university
right it’s like you know you don’t want to just do your own research you want to publish papers and share your knowledge and build the
common knowledge base of the area that you’re you know working in and so you know that era lasted for
about another you know seven or eight plus years and then suddenly this third wave of impacts started to
happen essentially the emergence of hyperscale players so some people call them fang but it’s
like you know facebook amazon apple netflix google all of these but there are more twitters
another example ebay is another early example all of these companies
started to build their platforms with conventional enterprise software but the real opportunity to be a game
changer was to leverage open source software to build a massive platform affordably the interesting
thing is all of those hyperscalers used open source to grow but they all had different approaches to
whether they would contribute back or not you know apple was an example of somebody who was very reluctant to contribute back early
on it just wasn’t in steve’s jobs culture to be a sharing caring kind of guy right it’s like
sure basically you want to give me free software i’ll take it but expect something for me you know forget that again i
mentioned ibm ibm was was the senior leadership back then was very savvy about open source
and realized that you know if ibm just showed up in these young open source communities and said
hey we’re the 800 pound gorilla you know and here’s how it’s going to work all those people would walk away
and you know that’s one of the great things about open source right is that individuals have freedom of action just
like you know companies do and so that’s a reason that ibm always has tried to be a
a balanced consumer and contributor but after the hyperscaler phase we’re into
this now fourth wave of impact and that’s that traditional enterprise companies companies like
ibm’s customers are starting to change the way they consume open source software
they’re still going to have these subscription support relationships uh with red you know red hat or
suse or canonical or ubuntu you know all the other recent startups
because you know that’s one of the key things that some people don’t really understand about
open source in the enterprise is that say your db and you put this open source
database out there and you’re getting all of these folks you know downloading copies of it and you’re going great
how do i you know how do i tell of all these thousands of people that are using it who can i actually sell something to and
you know some people would say oh it’s the big companies you can sell to big companies and or oh it’s the financial sector you
should sell to the financial sector but those are both wrong answers the the people that will actually give you money
are the people that are using your technology to build mission critical apps because if you have a mission critical
app that incorporates open source software you want someone to pick up the phone when things go wrong that has
influenced the direction that enterprises are taking so they will still have that
relationship but now they’re seeing the value of putting some of their own software developers
directly into open source projects that they feel are significant
to them and a great example of that in the u.s marketplace is a financial
company called capital one they started innovating over 10 years ago they they decided that they needed to
sort of have you know a research group you know why would a bank need a research group but they knew that you know technology had
potential they actually started their own open source program office five or six years ago and they’re now
also they’ve joined the cloud native computing foundation as part of the end user community and
they have some of their people participating again not everywhere because you know resources are not limited but
selectively they’re just one example of what i believe will happen with pretty much any significant sized
enterprise company in the next five years will have their own open source program office
because it’s just becoming that important to their business infrastructure and i kind of see the
osbo or open source program offices the heart of open source within the company i think that it’s definitely very
important to have that central point for people to come to and ask the questions particularly because there’s so many
around compliance security and everything related to open source and the way that you describe the four waves of open
source i thought it that you had a very similar perspective to mickey mccauley when it comes to describing those
different waves and meki was actually a guest on the podcast he also works at ibm funnily enough
but if i recall correctly meki explained the evolution of open source in three waves rather than four and he
explained that the first wave involved individuals who wanted to scratch their own itches like you said
and it turns out that they obviously saw the merit in reusing the code that others use and they also understood
the benefits of sharing it and building upon it to become experts themselves down the track then in the second wave he was saying
that people recognized that they had all of these collective libraries but they didn’t have a way to build upon
them so they ended up providing the value in the form of services and then the shift from product to
service meant that everything became as a service and at this time companies knew that
they had an itch but they didn’t necessarily want to scratch themselves and instead they wanted
others to scratch it for them he then defined the third wave as i mentioned at the beginning this podcast
um the enterprise open source strategy phase which i think you definitely definitely hinted at in in your fourth
wave and that’s happening now because companies are finally coming to terms with the fact that
open source isn’t just in it it’s in every area of the business well uh i i think that’s true i think
it’s also interesting that some people look at what’s happening in open source today and you know some of
them basically are saying wow this is kind of concerning you know because you know it was mark andreessen that
famously said you know some time ago that software was eating the world right and then some people observed about 10
years ago that open source is kind of eating enterprise software and if you think about it you know give
me a name of a new enterprise software company that’s emerged in the last decade you know
there really isn’t uh anything that comes top of mind in any significant fashion
and so in this world where everything’s becoming as a service will open source thrive because
one of the other challenge that has been a hot topic in open source for some time now is how do we make it sustainable you
know there’s some people that have tried to come up with some of these innovative models where you know you can
be an open source coder and you can kind of get sponsorship right or something like that or you can become an open source coder
and kind of do piece work and it doesn’t always necessarily provide a robust comfortable standard of
living if you’re kind of doing work hand-to-mouth like that but companies like ibm you know they support
their developers doing work in open source because it fits into this bigger picture right so
you know some people have said well gee maybe in the future only cloud companies or major tech companies will contribute
to open source because there’s really no opportunity for individual developers i
think the enterprise angle is the solution to that concern because it’s not just the big tech
companies it’s now midsize and even startup companies right there’s a very innovative company out of
ireland called near form that emerged out of the vibrant activity around the javascript
community and they have created a model in which they can engage with clients help them quickly
leverage the power of javascript to provide rapid application development
change in their organization and do that in such a way that it works
for near form it works for their clients and it helps support the open community around javascript i think
the other interesting question is you know what’s next you know is there a fifth wave and uh i
think part of that fifth wave is going to be the influence of open source in industry verticals
because one of the things that open source has been quite successful with is it’s basically uh some people like to
call it the plumbing right it’s the common infrastructure does the world need 12 operating systems
it’s always a very interesting question but as open source has kind of moved up the stack there now seems to be this
opportunity for other industries to innovate and one example of this
is you know the linux foundation has supported the creation of a sub foundation called the lf energy and
it’s principally focused at the electrical industry and you know why would they use or how would
they use open source and if you think about it just like you hear people talking about in it you know software fabric
or you know network as a service the ability of a utility to move away from the old
model because if you think about you know electrical infrastructure you know how do you buy
from certain vendors and yet have interoperability of the electrical grid
and how do you get away from the very expensive proprietary electrical grid
infrastructure and try and move towards something that’s a bit more affordable and a bit more
flexible right and if we’re going to as a society make this big pivot
from fossil fuels to a more renewable electrical future certainly
there seems to be an opportunity for open source software to provide a substantial
layer of that infrastructure that can be effectively shared across members in that industry
vertical so usually just one example a certainly open source in healthcare is another example right
one of the things that happened out of the covid situation was that company i mentioned earlier near form
was able to work uh to quickly develop a contact tracing app by collaborating with apple
and with google around the android operating system and come up with a way that phones could
be aware of other phones around that and yet still maintain the privacy of the individuals
it’s that kind of rapid innovation that i think will start to impact other industry verticals
so there’s there’s my call for the fifth phase that’s exciting and it’s definitely in line with something that a previous
guest in the podcast carl eric moles he is working it to bricked was previously the head of open source at
sony with a whole episode on open source in the automotive industry and he was having a conversation with
the head of a large truck company in europe and they were saying that in the next five years they don’t
think that the development around open source in the automotive industry will be much different to it is today but within
10 years he sees a significant impact on open source
particularly from the automotive industry which is exciting but i’d now like to shift gears and
focus on open source business models so can you touch on this concept and explain how ibm is
monetizing open source technologies today sure it’s funny because um uh in
the before times when we still went to conferences uh i would collaborate with a colleague of
mine stephen wally and we’d actually do a bit of a debate on the topic because
he had created this you know very thoughtful pitch on why there was no open source
business model and i suggested to him three or four years ago now that hey why don’t we do a sort of a next
generation of your thoughts here and do it as a debate and you can take that position
there isn’t one and i’ll take the position that there is and so we’ve done that uh and had a fun
time doing it the developers in the crowd always seem to kind of enjoy the give and take of it but the net of it is
is that he argues that open source is really a distribution method and a highly
efficient way to create software at scale because
again this concept of reuse this concept of you know collaborative software
development and giving you the opportunity to rapidly share because of the nature of open source and
the licenses being certainly you have to pay attention to whether the license you use is a bit more permissive or whether it’s
restrictive but he looks at it from that engineering perspective and i totally
you know respect that point of view but i also think it’s missing something if you just say well
there is no open source business model because you know look at firefox for example you know they
they survive in part on ad revenue right and so you know that’s that’s their
model and you know look at look at github right i mean people were shocked in the
industry because github you know became sort of the most dominant repository for open source
software and you probably know this some of your uh audience may not but
github was based on git git was developed by linus to help him deal with you know the
complexity of the linux kernel development and github was one of the few companies that
took the open source git software and said we’re going to put this you know user-friendly
ui wrapper around it and other value add and that was their model and so github
got to a certain size where again they were the the half of the software
created an open source lived on lives on github but the ability to monetize that
was underperforming dc expectations and there were rumors in the industry
that oh my gosh you know what happens if they flame out what happens if they don’t get to a sustainable business
model and they turn the lights off that would you know would have been tragic and so
lo and behold people were very surprised when suddenly the news broke that huzzah
microsoft is buying github and not just buying it but buying it for seven billion dollars
and incredible yeah i joke to steve that sounds like a pretty good business model to me
wish i’d thought of that and it was a it was less than a year later that ibm announced that they were buying red hat
and if seven billion dollars sounded expensive 34 billion dollars is quite a bit of money as well but
it’s just a validation of the fact that open source is here to stay that some
people will look at some of the warning signs and predict the sky is falling but
somehow open source continues to sort of evolve and survive and that it’s going to continue to have
significant impact in vertical industries as well as you know it’s changing fundamentally a
lot of things that are happening in intellectual property and in research and
other things definitely one interesting thing that amanda brock said on the podcast was open sources
like gravity it’s here to stay you’ve got to accept that it’s here and move on knowing that it is here to stay
so i think that definitely does resonate with some things i’ve heard in the past but that’s all we’ve got time for today
thank you so much for your time jeff it’s been amazing chatting to you getting to know you uh and also
just learning so many things in this podcast and on a previous call we had so thank you henry it’s been my pleasure um wish you
uh continued success and look forward we’ll have to chat again sometime in the not too distant future
definitely i would love to and for everyone who’s listening thank you for listening if you’re watching this thanks for watching
uh if you’re watching this on youtube then please leave a like and comment letting us know what you think uh also subscribe to see more content
like this and do the same on apple podcast or spotify just to really stay up to date with the
latest news in open source so thanks very much everyone thanks jeff until next time thank you
