Breaking Free from Proprietary Gravitational Pull Roman Shaposhnik, Director of Open Source Cyrus Wadia, Associate General Counsel – Strategic IP

SECTION 0 Launchpad: Pivotal Background

SECTION 1 Charting the Course: Business & Legal

SECTION 3 Liftoff & Ascent: R&D, Sales, Support

SECTION 4 Beyond the Solar System: Q&A

Agenda

Launchpad!

4

Doing open source even before we were Pivotal

2M+ monthly downloads of Spring Boot!

Software is Eating the World

The most innovative companies in the world don’t just use open source...

...They Grow it!

Pivotal Data Open Source journey began in 2015

Here’s what we accomplished in 2015

•  Apache Software Foundation Incubating project •  First release out! •  First user summit on March 9 •  Lots of customers and partners presenting

•  About to make its first release •  Working closely with customers turn partners

•  Over 500 GPDB Sandbox downloads •  Innovative companies already using open source

version •  Helping us improve based on latest PostgreSQL

advances

Charting the Course…

Before you begin: always be context sensitive

Vital Stats: 3.25M Lines of Code; 5 YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT

Vital Stats: 2M Lines of Code; 12 YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT

Vital Stats: 1.3M Lines of Code; 15+ YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT

What Is It: Open source cloud computing platform as a service

What Is It: Application Development Platform that

What Is It: Distributed, in-memory database for scale-out applications

What Does It Do: Supports the full application lifecycle, from development, through testing stages, to deployment, in multiple clouds

License Type: Apache 2.0

What Does it Do: Helps Developers build simple, portable, fast and JVM-based cloud-native applications

License Type: Apache 2.0

What Does it Do: Features elastic performance, database consistency, and resilient clustering

License Type: Apache 2.0

12

Elephant in the room: OSS Business Models

1. “Pure” Open Source2. Community Open Source3. Services + Support Open Source4. Subscription Open Source5. Multi-License Open Source

Choice #1 Who should

own the software?

Company

New OSS Foundation Existing Foundation

You (+) Choose

Foundation Chooses

You (+) Choose

Foundation Chooses

Choice #2 What License SHOULD you

use?

Choice #3 What is your Governance

Model?

1. Your top level Big Choices

•  Ownership Determined by the choice of business modelCOMPANY - “Benevolent dictator for life”: If you

choose to retain ownership of the OSS, you determine its course

Existing OSS Foundation - you step into an existing development and governance model

Create a Foundation - you create or collaborate on the development and governance model

1.1 Choice #1: Who Owns It?

•  Company Owns It:Advantages - Flexibility, you determine development

and governance models and licensing, fast track to commits, goodwill associated with the OSS project, Easy licensing, and easier adoption

Disadvantages - No existing community to tap into, distrust of single-vendor open source

1.1 Choice #1: Who Owns It?

•  Existing OSS Foundation Owns It:Advantages - Leverage existing big data communities,

established development and governance models, Apache 2.0 license as license of choice

Disadvantages -ASF is about active communities, not hosting; mostly English, projects with non-trivial infrastructure requirements, UI-centric projects not doing well, not a place for corporate collaboration, large scale platform projects not a great fit, projects with a lot of patents

1.1 Choice #1: Who Owns It?

•  New OSS Foundation Owns It:Advantages - Bringing together contributors

committed to the growth of a broad, open ecosystem; more control over development, governance model; scale of project cannot not be accomplished without widespread adoption, rapid innovation

Disadvantages - Single vendor baggage, ceding control over your products, enabling your competition

1.1 Choice #1: Who Owns It?

Licenses are a strategic intellectual property weapon and shield consisting of legal tools of copyrights, patents and trademarks

1.2 Choice #2: What OSS License?

•  Is it an OSI-approved license?•  Do we want to build a community/encourage adoption?•  What community are we trying to build?•  Do we want our code used in closed source applications by

competitors?•  Do we want to discourage forking?•  What is the public perception of the license we choose?•  What license will be the most efficient/easiest to use?•  What licenses protect our intellectual property?•  How much license reciprocity is required?•  What protections do we want in place for patent licensing &

litigation?•  What legal jurisdictions are we targeting?

•  Company Owns It:Governance - Empowered engineering leads

(gatekeepers); Leads drive innovation with community/customer feedback + contributions

Development - Distributed team, agile processes, public issue tracking, and a maniacal focus on design/quality

1.3 Choice #3: Gov/Dev Model?

•  Existing OSS Foundation Owns It:ASF Governance - Non-profit corporation, elects a

Board of Directors that sets corporate policy, and delegates ownership of project policies and execution to various officers and PMCs

ASF Development -the “Apache Way” is a consensus-based, community driven model with the ethos of merit, consensus, community and charity

1.3 Choice #3: Gov/Dev Model?

•  New OSS Foundation Owns It:Governance - “Governance by Contribution,” fosters

contribution from a broad community of developers, users, customers, partners, ISVs, while advancing the development of the PaaS at extreme velocity

Development - CFF “Dojos” encourage agile engineering, pair programming, daily standups, and public story trackers

1.3 Choice #3: Gov/Dev Model?

Liftoff & Ascent:R&D, Sales & Support

1.  Scanning your codea.  Early prep - knock out easy problemsb.  Component license compatibilityc.  Security issues

2.  Correcting code issuesa.  Fixing must-do issues from scan results before posting codeb.  Remove customer and personal information often found in commentsc.  Appropriate copyright notices in code headersd.  Removing features intended for commercial versions

3.  Doesn’t have to be perfect, can be work in progress

3.0 Cleaning up your Code

1.  Invest in toolsa.  CLA management and enforcement toolsb.  CI is a mustc.  Employees vs. GitHub

2.  Track IP lineagea.  Being a committer on the project is a lot of responsibility

3.  Manage it! Manage it well!

3.1 Congrats you now have “external R&D” org

3.2 Externalize your R&D and PM processes

3.2 Externalize your R&D and PM processes

3.3 Help your Sales and Support organizations1.  Sales

a.  Is there anything left to sell when everything is availblae for free?b.  “Loose a customer, gain a collaborator”c.  How do we sell to customers who are clueless about open source?d.  Doesn’t open source mean abandonment?

2.  Supporta.  Be very clear about your support policy – in fact, help draft it!b.  Make sure support folks join the communityc.  Accept the “information asymmetry” from now on

3.4 Invest in your community1.  User community

a.  Measure your time-to-hello-worldb.  Have an artifact for user community to coalesce aroundc.  Meetups and challenges work

2.  Contributor communitya.  Measure your time-to-first contributionb.  Invest in regular sync up events and an occasional summitc.  If it didn’t happen on the mailing list/JIRA/slack it didn’t happen

Beyond the Solar System: Q&A

Thanks!

Roman Shaposhnik | @rhatr Cyrus Wadia | @cyruswadia