Sean McManus, TelecomTV (00:05):
Hi, my name is Sean McManus from Telecom tv. I am here at Cloud Native Telco in London, and I'm joined now by Hilary Carter from the Linux Foundation, who is the SVP of Research. Hilary, tell us about your role.

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (00:17):
Thank you, Sean. It's great to be here. I have the privilege of leading the research function at the Linux Foundation. For the past four years, we have been conducting empirical studies into open source, the paradigm for mass collaboration at scale, and being able to articulate through data, the value proposition, the challenges, and the opportunities that open source projects, open source communities, open source collaboration, can bring to different stakeholders in society, to people in government, enterprise leaders, industry leaders, and open source developers very broadly. And in the past four years, we've conducted, I think we're at 76 unique research studies using different methodologies, quantitative methodologies, qualitative methodology, and really co-create research together with hundreds of thousands of open source developers to bring about these insights, which really didn't exist in a central library or central portfolio before until now. And so we are a resource for decision makers to evaluate open source projects in different contexts, and we look at open source from a geographic level, what's taking place on a worldwide scale or a regional scale, what's happening in Europe or what's happening within an individual country like Japan, and what makes different regions unique and how we can close different regional gaps.

(01:48):
We also explore industry specific challenges, and our most recent study is specific to the networking industry, which is why we're having this conversation. But we've studied other industries as well. Financial services being another really good example of a very similar industry that's like a hundred year old industry that's increasingly becoming software defined. And in that transformation to digitalization within an industry, open source is a part of that journey, and who is leading in that acceleration? What are the opportunities and what are the challenges? So that's sort of the question that our department helps to answer through these empirical studies.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (02:32):
Thank you. Tell us a bit about the LF Networking community and what that does.

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (02:37):
So LF Networking is our industry vertical specific to the networking community. They're one of our most mature project ecosystems. Very engaged community of industry organizations and stakeholders who really have collaborated at a pre-competitive level of the networking technology stack, and they work with their fiercest competitors to get a win-win. And so the LF Networking Foundation hosts networking specific technologies and provides a framework for collaboration and problem solving for all organizations in networking to lower the costs of digital transformation, to lower the costs of innovation, to lower the costs of regulatory compliance and get shared value in a way that is non-threatening and doesn't interfere with the differentiating side of the networking business. Essentially, everybody collaborates on the stuff they all need, lowering the cost to 5G, lowering the adoption of AI and lowering the cost associated with other types of technology implementations. So that's what LF Networking is all about, and it's led by arrp, Josh Pura, who's been at the organization for I think, oh gosh, eight years now. And yeah, we were pleased to conduct our very first empirical study for LF Networking under LF Research, and the full findings will be published in a couple of weeks time.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (04:17):
Based on the research you've done, how does the LF networking community compare with other open source communities?

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (04:23):
That's a great question. We were delighted with the results of the LF networking survey because it had a very high respondent rate. What was very clear to us when we first started working with ARPI and LF networking on this year's study was the extent to which his community responded to the survey and provided not just a high quality response rate, I think about 85% respondent rate, which is very good. Those who completed the survey and responded with a high level of acumen as well as a high level of seniority. So we had a really robust dataset from very, very senior people, and we realized the extent to which LF networking is a highly engaged, very effective organization at the Linux Foundation. So it was a delight. Not all studies have such high rates of engagement and such a good response rate as this one.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (05:25):
Tell us a bit about how Telco as a sector compares to other sectors you've studied.

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (05:30):
Well, there are commonalities, I think as other sectors go about their pursuit of modernization, digitalization becoming more software defined, dealing with industry regulations around software, around cybersecurity, around talent shortages and skill shortages, how they deal with license compliance and networking faces similar challenges in of networking company willingness to have full-time employees contribute to open source projects that was not unique to the networking space. It's something that we see across all the industries that we study, that there is this conundrum between open source use and willingness for upstream open source contribution. And so it's incumbent upon us as an organization at the Linux Foundation level, but also at the industry foundation level through LF networking to help convey that value proposition for organizations to close those gaps, to close both talent shortage gaps and contribution gaps through understanding the benefits of engagement in that particular capacity. So in many ways, it's not unique. It shares the same kind of challenges as we've seen, say, financial services and healthcare and other centuries old industries. But what is also true is the value of using open source within this industry is unequivocal very, very high value usage rates, like 92% of organizations and networking, seeing high value from using open source software and even higher value of engagement through the foundation to mutualize problem solving and to lower the cost of addressing some of the common challenges that enterprises face.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (07:32):
Tell us about some of the value that comes from projects being hosted by the Linux Foundation and how that applies to the telco sector.

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (07:39):
Thank you. What's interesting, and something that's become increasingly obvious over the last several years is the value of a foundation model is very different from an open source project that is singularly governed. We've learned that there's open source and then there's open source and open governance, and it is the governance, the open governance that really is a value add when it comes to license continuity. When an organization takes a dependency, a technological dependency on a piece of open source software and builds that into their project in a significant way, it's really important that the license of that project doesn't change. Over the past several years, we've seen a number of instances where open source projects have changed their license projects that are widely used across leading organizations around the world, and that's incredibly costly and disruptive. When a project is hosted under a foundation, it gives developers within and outside of an organization a lot of comfort knowing that the likelihood of a license change where a project is openly governed is slim to none. And that's one of the value propositions that a foundation model provides, and I think that's why we've been able to scale, certainly Linux Foundation umbrella of open source projects from the Linux kernel to more than a thousand hosted projects today. And that's why there's a lot of trust that comes from the open governance.

Sean McManus, TelecomTV (09:23):
That's great. Hilary, thank you very much.

Hilary Carter, The Linux Foundation (09:25):
Thank you, Sean.