hey everybody welcome back to the 19th episode of open source for business brought to you by open teams my name is
henry badri and in this episode i chatted with amanda brock as the ceo of open uk amanda is a key
driver of open source in the uk she coordinates technology business and industry
and i think this podcast will be really useful to anyone who wants to know more about the state of open source in the uk
and europe at large some of the interesting topics that we also cover include the open invention
network which is the largest patent licensing community in the world for open source
software we also discussed the importance of defensive patent strategies for enterprises
and how contributing to open source communities gives a company the power to influence the project’s direction
whether you are a user a developer manager or you’re just curious about the industry open teams is a place to find the
information news training and support that you need to thrive with open source software
now the introductions are out of the way let’s get started with this open source software
we also discussed it’s the importance of defensive pandas so much for joining
me on the podcast today for enterprises morning henry so we met about a year ago and talk about open source software
contributing to open source point in time you’re just taking up your role at open uk but i know that before that
for 25 years you were actually a lawyer so can you walk us through your careers evolution to give us a better idea of
how you actually got here today yeah absolutely so back in 2008 just over 13 years ago
i had been a lawyer for over a decade i was in house i was pretty senior i used to run legal teams particularly
in startups or areas of businesses where they were building a team eye starting from scratch or evolving a team
and 13 years ago as i say i joined canonical uh an open source company that’s pretty big these days
back then i was employee 165 they were pretty unheard of unless you were very
into open source in ubuntu and i joined to set up and run the legal
team which i did for five years now i suppose when i joined i joined to be a commercial corporate lawyer
with my background i had a strong history in tech i’d worked in dot com
uh era across an isp and i guess nobody really expected that
when i joined i would completely fall in love with open source i would get into the community the ethos
what it was all about so that was a bit of a strange one a bit of a revelation for me
um after i left canonical i stayed with various open source projects kept my
involvement in open from 2013 onwards and then back in 2018 i was asked to get
involved with open uk which i did in 2019. and what was it that you love so much about the open
source community that really got you hooked i think it’s the fact that well there’s a few things actually
um the smart people i really like the people involved in it i like the culture
i like the collaboration i like the concept of sharing being at the heart of everything we do um the practicality of
the way everything is reused and built upon it really appeals to me okay i think it
definitely a lot of people agree with you i’ve asked a few people that it seems to be a very similar answer that got them
drawn in and hooked for life because these people a lot of these people you know johnny bacon was one of the yeah yeah john was there with me john it was
a baby back then he was a community manager at uh canonical okay he was the second guest on this
podcast so i asked him the same question he had a very very similar answer he said that you all went down to the pub for quite a few
years after a lot of you how much practicing did your brummie accent take
yeah we did a lot of practice looking in the mirror yeah no it was a very social place and um
obviously we could still travel and we did a lot of sprints and things in the office and all hands and we hung out
together we really got to know each other it was in some ways i remember jane silber the
ceo describing us at the time as the cool kids and we were it was a moment in time and canonical was groundbreaking
and a lot of the best people in open source have passed through at some stage in my five years there but
it was also a very close place and i assume that’s reflected over the open source
way you know i hear people in red hat talking about working there and it being similar
there’s no hierarchy in a traditional sense everybody’s able to have an opinion and that that kind of culture
matters i think definitely and what are the aims of open uk the place that you’ve been running for the last
year over a year now it’s interesting so i’m really lucky in that i joined
something on the basis that i could completely transform it
and we we were a bit like the other country-specific ngos looking purely at
software really focused on smes and really focused on supply chain
now those things all matter and i’m not in any way diminishing them but what we’ve done is pull together
this amazing board of people in the uk and sit down and think strategically
with a clean sheet of paper and we’ve come up with the three opens open source software
open hardware and open data and we believe that today you have to amalgamate those three
because data is at the heart of everything we do with software today and then if you talk to the hardware
guys and you look at what’s developing there around things like open silicon you’ll see that it’s difficult to
differentiate the edges so we brought together the three opens and we’re not just about software i say
just obviously that in its own is huge but we’re about the three opens and we set a vision then which was uk
leadership in open technology and to develop and sustain that
now that’s not a sort of xenophobic thing that’s about looking at our geographical audience and it was
triggered by brexit that we should do that and look at that geographical audience bring them together
and create a vibrant community that has a voice now as we’ve evolved that community
piece has become the first pillar and we want to demonstrate the scale of that community in the uk
to allow that voice to be heard in legal and policy which then lets us make the uk a great
place to do open in but also and really importantly from so as we focus locally that’s so we can
collaborate globally and our third piece is education and learning because we understand that if
you have a community you influence it you make us this hub of open then we look at the next stage and the
next stage is the next generation and building their skills whether that’s at a business level with things like our
future leaders group or whether that’s bringing um the right digital skills to young people
so we we’re actually one of the five finalists and the gnome community
challenge we’ll find out if we’re a winner of that next week on the 7th
but in that we’re you know we’re looking at building coding skills but at the same time
teaching what opens all about teaching the the basic principles and this year’s course
is based on the open source definition and the 10 principles so we’ve got yeah i’ve got a lot going
on and what i find is that over time as different people get involved their influence comes in so now we’re speaking to a lot of the
open source companies who either have a very big presence in the uk or strong presence in the uk
who are founded here or who are still uk and talking to them we see a real need
to develop on the entrepreneurial side and to help to build those skills so we’re looking at bringing on board a
founder’s forum an entrepreneur in residence and all being well we’ll be announcing that in
april so i wanted to start off by focusing on a great initiative that open uk has been
doing this year and that’s a three-phase report called the state of open uk in 2020. for those listening
i’ll leave a link to the report in the description and i read online that the purpose of the report is to allow business
industry and the public sector to better understand the scale and adoption of open source
within the uk but also to help to plan new digital initiatives around it so so far you’ve released the first part
of the report which i read assess the current state of open source in the uk and also the country’s
position in the global open source landscape so what are some of the interesting things that the first part of the report
found yeah so you’ve probably heard all the stereotypes about british people right
and i think what we’ve discovered is culturally if we didn’t already know this about ourselves it’s been a
self-awareness exercise culturally we’re quite reserved culturally we’re not very good at saying
oh i’m good at that you know it’s just not in our nature you’re always sort of taught not to be like that and i guess it’s one of the
major distinctions between us and the north americans who are really good at saying hey i can do that you know that’s me
i think it’s time we change that for open source otherwise we’re going to get left behind and what we’ve realized is that we were
the biggest contributor in the european union by far germany was behind us as a close second
france was way behind as a you know a sort of poor third and then you have the rest of europe now
that’s something that we had never really shouted about we’d never drawn out
we are i think in cncf’s landscape the fifth biggest contributor in the world
but if you look at the four ahead of us in terms of size and scale they are so much bigger
that per capita we’re one of the world’s biggest contributors to open source now if i’d said uk and open source to
you you wouldn’t automatically say to me oh my god there’s so much going on in the uk part of the reason for that is that the
uk companies the founders either shift them to the us or they get sold in
or they just get absorbed up into it and that’s part of the founders work we’re going to be looking at is why that’s
happening and how do we need to change but already in my conversations with those founders
you know we get back to the same issues that companies based on open have all over the world things like your revenue model your
commercial model how you manage your ip you know how you evolve the business how you sell something that you give away
or don’t and create something else around that um but what we’ve also come back to with
the uk is a bit of a confidence gap and that confidence gap is the
confidence to stand up and say well actually i’ve chosen to stay in the uk not move to asia not move to the us or
wherever it is and i’m going to run my business here and actually government to make that
competitive here’s what we need so looking at the report as phase one what we’ve done is we’ve
looked at the existing landscape we’ve looked at the data that was already available about things like
number of developers and we’ve updated that for 2021 we’ve taken formula
that others have created around how you assess it and if you look at the really worst case
which is definitely way too low you’re looking at something i think it was 14 billion
contribution per annum to the uk’s gdp if you look at the work the european
commission have just completed which they shared on the 5th of february we haven’t quite got their report yet
which is a shame but we do have their data and if we apply their methodology we are we’re
contributing up to 43 billion per annum to the uk economy which is
just massive and it’s even more massive if you look at the most recent
after our report an organization called technation came out with a report saying that the
uk digital economy was worth 248 billion now i believe that the figures
we’ve given are way way too low so if we were to take that 43 billion
i think you could increase that by 50 to 100 to look at what we’re really
contributing so i think when you then go back to the uk’s digital economy
we’re at least a third of it and that’s really going to shake things up a bit because as we look at digital strategies
as we look at policies things like tax break you know skills for the future
movement of workers as we talk about all of those we’re not currently talking about those
to improve digital skills in the uk but if we can demonstrate that that’s
where our business people are that’s where our technology people are those are what we need then i think
we can get government to listen but nobody’s going to listen to you unless you can prove your point right so that’s why we went out and started
the report and it’s been brilliant the the reception we’ve had to it’s been amazing but even
in the people i would have said were you know the hardcore open source people just giving them that data opens the
conversation up it gives them something to hang their argument on so i think it’s a really
good thing to have done i’m conscious i’m talking enough a lot henry but uh is a podcast i suppose
if you look at what we want to do with it for the next two phases and we’ll kick off phase two
when i get back after the easter holiday basically so um we want there to create a set of
questions and we will keep them as short as we can it’s likely to be something like 20 questions
we’ll send those out to industry not to technology and we’ll get them to look at whether
they’re using open or not to try and identify the scale of utilization
so normally when people value open they look at the inbound they look at lines of code numbers of developers
so instead of doing that we want to see how much it’s used in business because of digital
transformation and at the same time we’ll start phase three’s work and phase three’s work will
be looking at different ways of valuing now you may have come across something called donut economics there is a book
published on thursday this week by a chap called will page called tarzan
economics and will is a scottish actually but based in london
he was spotify’s economist and he’s looking at ways that you can value the digital economy not just
software not just open source and he’s thinking about the music sector which is a good comparator
because if you look at that if you go back 20 years it was all created by record labels and produced by
by them if you look today a tenth comes from them and 90 comes from individuals and that’s a bit
like software right so i often quote mark shuttleworth my old boss and he talks about not being able to use
the lens of the past where software was in the hands of the few and having to look forward where it’s in
the hands of many of course thanks to open source so i think there’s some really good comparators there
what we want to do is we want to demonstrate a different kind of value we want to show the value these
businesses are getting out of using open and how much is generating in the
economy because i think what uh we’ll see not just in the uk but all over the world
is that through digital transformation companies have shifted and they’ve understood that their products are created
distributed consumed through software and that they’ve become software companies they
they all of devops they all understand the need for software and software developers what the c-suite generally does not yet
fully understand is that they’re using open source and that there’s values but there’s also responsibility and i
think you start by showing them the users you show them the value as a consumer
you show them the responsibility and the and the benefits of being somebody sitting around the
table helping to define how the projects move forward and actively contributing and that’s really
how you create that engagement cycle so we’re hoping that the questions will help draw that out
and that we can even to those who don’t understand yet they’re using it we can help to show them that they are
so it’s quite a big project really a very big project and it sounds like it’s definitely a year-long thing you’ve got something to look forward to at every
point in the year and something to work on and just on the point of how companies are now taking
or seeing the value of not only using open source but getting involved with the communities i was talking on the podcast the other day
with patrick mcfadden our good friend yeah from open tech response and he was saying if if the companies aren’t
involved with open source communities of the libraries that they’re using then it’s just a ticking time bomb so i’d now
like to shift gears and ask you a question about your role as a european representative for the
open invention network so what is this organization so oin
is something that i got involved with when i was at canonical back in i think 2008 actually was one of the
first things that i found and back then there was a lot of talk
about patents patents have been a big issue for open source and they still are just maybe in a
slightly different way so one of the the problems with patents when you look
at technology generally is that as an intellectual property right they are
a a grant of a monopoly so with copyright you are able to stop someone taking your
output your code they cannot just use what you’ve done unless you give them a license and that’s the whole basis of
open source patents are a bit of an adjunct and they give the creator
the innovator the innovator the person who creates a novel idea they give them the rights in the idea
and that’s quite a different thing so if you think about software if you think about something like a
phone there are at least 80 000 patents in your phone
it’s incredible and what you have is a state of plane technology where when you look at any
particular area everybody working on that is driving to the same outputs they’re trying to
get to the next stage and that next stage is clear um and that the the one who does and who
registers it first potentially can get a pattern and exclude everybody else so you have to think about the nature of
patterns and how that sits with open source that exclusionary right and with patents the licensing is a
little bit more tricky and the way they sit with our our open source license is a little bit more tricky
so the open source communities that come up with this really elegant solution as you would expect it’s based on
collaboration and the idea is that it’s fair enough if you happen to have patents we are agnostic
right we’re not going to tell you you shouldn’t have them some companies have them defensively like red hat
and then what you see is that we will we’ll take those and we’ll agree that we won’t sue each
other and will agree to share in the same way as we share our code to the extent that that relates to open
source and um what oin does is oin is the world’s biggest defensive pattern pool
ever in history it’s the biggest defensive intellectual property organization ever in history and the
beauty of it this elegant solution i talk about is it’s based on a cross license as i say where we all agree that we’ll share
any patterns and we won’t sue each other with respect to them and there are about three and a half thousand
members or licensees who’ve signed up to that but nobody pays anything and i think that’s
critical to the whole open source model so it is absolutely free to join now
there’s obviously a cost of administering and managing that and that was paid by the founders
so the six founding companies there are two additional companies that have become main board members and there are two
affiliates and one of those affiliate members is canonical and i took canonical into oin
the difference between the licensees and the members is that they donate and we donated 5 million at canonical it
was a big deal we made a decision to do that as opposed to registering patents which i think very
much was the right thing um personally i’m not a pan of
pan i’m not a fan of patterns not a pan of patterns yeah well i’m not
going to be a pan of factory i could be i couldn’t be a fan of patents but i’m not i’m uh i’m i’m somebody who thinks that patents
are fine in a context like the farm industry where they’re very clearly what they were designed to
be which is a reward for innovation but in software i think they’re an inhibitor
they stop new entrants they stop development they stop competition i don’t think they work in software now
that’s not oin’s view oin is patent agnostic and you can have them when you can’t it’s entirely up to
you you can sign up with no patents and you still get the benefit of the license so you can say
that you want to be part of it you actually give nothing but you still get the benefit of this
patent pool that they’ve pulled together and to my mind signing up to oin is
something that’s part of your evolution any organization using open source should be
in there but as you go down that governance route there is no excuse not to have signed up
so as you start to become a responsible member of the community it’s part of the good housekeeping of being in it yeah that makes that makes a
lot of sense to me and one of the previous guests in the podcast mickey macaulay he discussed how ibm topped the u.s patent
list for the 28th consecutive year in a row at first glance i thought okay
that’s not good that’s bad because are bad for open source communities because it ultimately limits limits their ability to innovate
however then when i talked to him he said that ibm pledged to use those patents defensively like you were talking about for
things like the linux community and other open source communities to actually stop patent trolls from suing
them so i thought that was really interesting as a strategy and i think some people might think that ibm is
actually a big bad player but as we all know ibm’s making the shift from from blue to red now uh which is red hat
i wouldn’t just say they’re making that shift nice so it took me a little while to understand the landscape and open source but ibm
has been one of the biggest financial contributors now you could look at someone like
microsoft who says 2018 has really engaged and i think github shows microsoft as the biggest
contributor for lines of code but ibm has been there the 13 years that
i’ve been involved ibm has been there it’s been funding um oin is 15 years old ibm was one of the
six initial founders who put in 20 million and it’s patent pool you know
so ibm has been a consistent the red hat piece um was just another step in the journey
i think so given your experience i’m really interested and curious to know what are some of the key trends that
you’ve been noticing in the industry that you think enterprise is listening should be aware of that’s a good question henry there’s
been an obvious shift with the platform economy and the way
that we see open source developing and i think that the biggest trend that
i’ve seen is the pervasiveness and the move across sectors
so we’ve always said open sources for everybody but i think in 2021 with
the acceleration of digital transformation that the pandemic has caused which is the silver lining i think what
we now see is open source everywhere so when i was working on the report we
were talking about i spoke to a relatively senior figure
in a cloud company and what he said to me is why are you doing this because open
source is like gravity it’s everywhere and there is no point in fighting it
there’s nothing you can do about it you just have to accept it and then get on
and i think that that’s the key thing that we’re seeing now i don’t think it’s a particular
technical trend or evolution i think it’s this fact that it is everywhere
and if the you know your podcast is for c suite business people primarily if you are one of those
what you now need to work out is the value of your use to you which is
going to be incredibly significant and how you can leverage that to make it
as much as possible and the way to do that is to bring in knowledgeable people
not saying get rid of your existing team or say augment it add to it bring in people who understand
how to be part of the open source community and to collaborate with the open source community and that’s a business
community in the main these days bring people in who can do that and get your seat at the table so that you can
contribute back and in that contribution you gain some power because you can also help to shape
what’s happening and by shaping what’s happening you gain your own control despite the fact that you were part of
this probably overwhelming community if you look at it from the outside in so i think the major
trend the major thing that’s happening is the mainstreaming you know sometimes you hear people say
that software’s eating the world and then jim zemlin would say to you open source is eating his lunch i think we’re now at a point in time
where open source is gravity and you need a little bit of help to work with that gravity and make it
work to your best advantage definitely i couldn’t agree more and it’s definitely a premise that we believe in at open
teams is that working with the community allows you it gives you that power to oh probably power isn’t the right word
you’ve got to be quite careful about how you how you talk about commercial enterprises working with open source communities but it gives you the
leverage uh that you can then have a say in the way and direction that a certain project goes yeah i think
power is the right word because it’s about the power of openness not about leveraging power over a community
because if you join part of a community you’re part of a community you’re not in charge definitely i agree with you there
and you also have a book coming out later this year and the chapter that you’ve written in that book is about commercial models and
revenue streams in open source can you touch on that for a bit sure sure so the book is a second edition
it’s the first that i’ve edited and it will be the last that i edit on my own it has been the biggest job i had no
idea what i was taking on and it might have been slightly foolish but it is almost done at this point
there are about 20 authors who are some of the world’s leaders in their spaces people like pam chess stick on
trademarks roy smith on copyright so it’s got those very legal pieces but it’s called um
open source software law policy in practice it’s published by oxford university press
but as well as those legal pieces there’s a chapter on community with steve worley and ross gardler at
microsoft and how you you know you develop communities there’s a chapter on sustainability in
open source there’s a chapter on all sposed by nithya rough at comcast
so you know it covers what you need to know if you are looking at the the governance side um
i’ll talk a little bit about my chapter in a second now it’s been done by oxford university press you’re a very
established publisher and it’s really expensive right which you would expect but the beauty of it is that the veach
foundation have given us funding to allow it to be open access
so when it’s published around september it will be freely available to everybody and that’s i think the best thing about
it and the thing i’m most proud of in terms of content there is a
there’s a chapter on the economics of open but my chapter is about commercial models and revenue streams a little bit
about contracts and it looks at the fairly limited scope that there are for a revenue generation of the
different models that there are and actually takes you through the history because it’s very possible to
make money out of open you have to understand how you’re doing it and you can’t fit a square peg into a
round hole but fundamentally open source is not a business model so you can’t just rock up make something
open and expect it to work you have to think it through and understand what you’re doing and you have to understand
that you cannot if you are going to call something open source put it onto a proprietary license like
sspl and you cannot um just rely
on the revenue generation happening you cannot exclude a third party from taking your code and
using it on something else and it comes back henry to where we started and we were talking about learning
and the open source definition and we’re going to be teaching it to high school kids this year
unfortunately some founders haven’t learned it and they don’t fully understand what open means when they they take advantage of
all of the the sort of um the benefits of scale that open brings
and we’re seeing it being used a little bit as a marketing exercise and then flipping to proprietary that’s
really not what community and contribution is all about so i i hope that my chapter will help to
give some guidance on that learning is definitely important but before we wrap this up i’d like to ask
you my favorite question when you think about the future of open source software what excites you
most this is very personal but from a from a personal perspective
i’m sitting in the uk we’ve talked about the uk of really being a center of excellence and open source
and for the next few years that’s going to be my focus and my engagement and i’m excited to see the reactions
from people to working on that to pulling together to building our community and making it
a much more uh present community and you know to build that presence
so for me the excitement is very much about being part of the leadership around
cutting-edge technology in the uk and helping us to build a really thriving community that’s exciting and
already as one of the largest contributors and i think it was top five users of open source in the world
the uk was it’s great to see that you’ve got we’ve got such great leadership backing that and there’s an australian
i think we’ve still got a connection with the uk and our queens we still have a queen so hopefully we’ll be able to jump on the
back of those developments that’s funny grab onto the tassels of
you guys walking around but thank you so much for your time amanda it’s been great chatting it’s been good to see you it’s been a while
um but all the best going forward thanks henry i’m glad to see you and hopefully your audience all staying well
thanks very much and thank you to everyone who listened
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