There’s no need to bury the lead here. Soumith Chintala is the central figure in a major transition in the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He works at Meta where he’s the manager of PyTorch, an open source machine learning framework that was recently transferred to the Linux Foundation. PyTorch enables ML engineers to deploy new AI models in minutes rather than weeks.

Soumith has been a community leader for the past decade, but he was a self-described introvert when he was growing up in Hyderabad. He is a researcher with over 52,000 citations and an h-index of 29 in Machine Learning, computer vision, and robotics, while focusing on high-risk research. From Marvel movies to memes, people such as Soumith are admired in modern culture. But this wasn’t the case in the 1990s when being a geek was still outside the norm.

It’s a consistent pattern at most companies: High-value data and corporate memory are stored in isolated channels on disparate systems. Old processes are protected by those who have been there the longest. The problem is, the DNA of the company becomes lost as long-time employees depart, making it difficult for new hires to find what is available, why decisions were made, and who they can look to for answers. 

Michael Lewis talks about this in his podcast, “Against the Rules” in the series “Six Levels Down”. When he was looking for someone who actually understood how the insurance industry processes claims and what all the obfuscated code numbers meant, and how doctors actually get claims paid, he had to go six levels deep, to an overworked expert, toiling away down in the hospital basement. She actually knew what all that gobble-di-goop meant. 

Ashley Wolf, Open Source Program Office Lead at GitHub, has confronted this dilemma throughout her career. Not only can there be missing documentation for existing processes, there is pushback when it came to phasing out outdated processes and tooling.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Against the Rules: Six Levels Down, with Michael Lewis
• Ashley Wolf, Open Source Program Office Lead, GitHub

With major software vulnerabilities popping up on what seems like a weekly basis and government regulation imminent when it comes to providing a software bill of materials for any application sold to the United States government, collaboration on open source security is no longer optional.

Large enterprises have come to realize that it's better to work together, to find common solutions rather than go it alone. Some financial service companies have been hesitant to embrace the inevitable move to open source. They perceive it to be more of a risk than a reward.

The promise of innovation through collaboration hasn't been enough to change that perception. Even proven ROI hasn't done the trick. So what's the answer how do we reach financial institutions that are holding out, how do we help them make the transition?

“I usually say that I’m a hybrid,” Ana Jiménez says. In this context what does that even mean, what is a hybrid? According to the Oxford Language Dictionary, a hybrid is “a word formed from elements taken from different languages, for example television ( tele- from Greek, vision from Latin).” If we use that as our definition, Ana Jiménez Santamaria has a good reason to call herself a hybrid; she can speak the language of the business world as well as that of the developer domain.

Ana holds a master’s degree in data science and a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Her journey to open source began at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Móstoles (MO’-stoeles), Spain on the southwest outskirts of Madrid. In 2017 she spent a year at the University of California, Riverside studying consumer behavior before returning home to Móstoles to get her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and Master’s Degree in Data Science.

When it comes to getting visibility for their work, most engineers working on open-source projects aren’t thinking about the science of human behavior or marketing. They want to address a problem, apply their knowledge to create the technology, and create something useful for themselves. Ana understands that because it was something she did at the beginning of her career.

Allan Friedman was one of the first, if not THE first person to talk with me about the need for a mandatory software bill of materials to be attached to all software back in 2017 when he was Director of Cybersecurity Initiatives for the US Department of National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

In today’s show we’ll do a deep dive with Allan, tracing his path from doing economic research at Harvard in the early 2000s, to becoming the country’s most recognized advocate on SBOM legislation as the current Senior Advisor and Strategist for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the United States Government.

Ahmedabad is the largest city in the state of Gujarat (goo jer raht) in western India. It has a population of over eight million people. This is where Arpit Joshipura, GM of LFNetworking at the Linux Foundation, was born and raised. The city of Ahmedabad is divided into two major sections, dissected by the Sabarmati River. The east side is what’s considered the “old” city, while the west side houses educational institutions such as Gujarat University, M.G. Science Institute, Government Polytechnic, and St. Xavier’s College, where Arpit received a bachelor’s degree in engineering in the late 1980s.

In 1989, he moved to North Carolina to study Computer Engineering and Computer Systems Networking and Telecommunication. His master's thesis was in TCP IP. Think about that. There wasn’t public email yet. No cellphones. There was no public connectivity to the DoD DARPA systems. The industry that was to become a lifelong passion for Arpit was on the cusp of being invented.

I tell people, you have to like what you do and you have to do what you like. These days, people are like, “Oh, I will only do what I like.” Well, that's not what it is. If something is important and it's going to change the world, do it and you better like it. So that's the flexibility part of the new generation that we had 30 years ago.

Arpit has now been in the networking industry for over 30 years. In the technology field, that’s several lifetimes. What has kept him fascinated with network engineering for so long?

Technology influences every aspect of our life. It's hard to remember a time when analog was separate from the digital. How do we balance the pace of innovation with its social impact when everything is changing so quickly? 

For Daniel Krook, these two threads converged in 1995. 

Dan went to Trinity College, a small liberal arts school in Hartford, Connecticut. He wasn't sure what to major in, a common dilemma when making the jump from high school to college. The choice of a liberal arts school offered a broad range of choices and an introduction to different personalities. There was a lot of mixing of people from different backgrounds with different interests. 

Dan was a political science major and graduated with a double major in international studies, but he happened to live with a computer science major his first year.

"Back in 95, I was introduced to web development.  It was a very wired campus. building websites,  deploying  stupid little fun hobby websites. And that's really what got me into learning HTML, the early days of JavaScript. I took my first course on that in 97. So blows my mind 25 years ago.  

"Just learning,  to create something and immediately see it visible  was great. And you contrast that with  policymaking, where it takes a long time to establish an impact and things can be reversed by the change in administration on all the work you did."

"The Untold Stories of Open Source" is a Linux Foundation Project.

The Unreal gaming engine launched in 1998. It was a fun time. It was like, “Oh my God, we can build our own games and gaming maps!” But those earlier in the gaming cycle thought there was a better alternative already on the market: the launch of Quake in 1996. Royal O’Brien, currently GM of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation was one of those. 

Royal O'Brien: Starting with the Quake Gaming Engine

I didn't start writing Unreal mods until probably 2001, 2002. Until then I was writing Quake One, Quake Two, Quake, Three mods all over the place. Unreal Tournament, that wasn't the cool engine. Everybody was on the Quake engine. We were building mods left and right for the Quake engine.

 As a matter of fact, gosh, 98. I mean, you're talking that's  Quake Two land because Quake Three was coming out, I think  was 99. We started writing mods in Quake One and Quake Two.  Writing mods in Quake Two was really the way to go. 

So The key about Unreal Tournament was it didn't have a limited palette.  It had better fidelity of color  is what it was. But it wasn't as performant but it had all of this potential  and it did things differently than the way we did it in Quake. In Quake you had to create a sealed container.

You had to build a box that was sealed because when you went to do the vis lighting on it if anything escaped, it would draw rays. And if one of the rays got out your level, it didn't compile. That's the way it worked.  Unreal was different. It was a solid chunk and you carved out your level from it.

For Royal O’Brien, before there was Quake, before there was Unreal, instead of graduating from high school there was military service and a G.E.D.. He was able to get his Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification within a matter of weeks, instead of a matter of months. This idea of not adhering to a formal education, the learning cycle of being self-taught and applying that to real-word experience, has been the core of his growth within the open source community. 

"A lot of the companies I've worked for were trying to transition from proprietary or very siloed products, very black box products to more standards based products. And that seems to be a common thread that I've gone through even in proprietary companies. Avaya also was trying to move away from a very, very monolithic black box voice messaging system that they had millions of dollars invested in called the Octel Voice Messaging system.

"They wanted to go to more of a standards based system where, and also a more componentized system, if you will, with the voice server at the back, and then all the UI and the functions and the application server and the front. 

"Especially in the embedded space, articulating the value of a company based distribution, say like a Wind River versus roll-your-own was really hard because if you looked at that market in those days 75 to 80% of customers wanted to roll their own. And so the 20% of the market was kind of split between all the commercial vendors.

"It's been hard through the timeframe from then to now to really find good ways to monetize you know, over open source. And as you know, Red Hat's been one of the most successful companies in this area, but most companies have really struggled to monetize and, and sustain an open source based business.

"The cloud is providing a better business model. Delivering the product as a service because the operationalization of an open source product is so difficult to do, and it saves you the time of installation, integration, support, testing. You can just start running the product from day one. I think that's been a pretty good business model.

What is really, really interesting to me is how open source community becomes an extended engineering team for you. And that you can then focus on your core competency while leveraging the extended team for common components that all of us use."

-- Nithya Ruff

Resources from this Episode

• Beau Vrolek: https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/11/16/sgi-in-the-new-millennium-an-interview-with-beau-vrolyk/
• Dave McAllister: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davemc/details/experience/
• Silicon Graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Graphics
• IRIX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX
• Wyatt Starnes - Tripwire: https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/in_memorium_wyatt_starnes/
• Wind River: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_River_Systems
• Sumit Sadana: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumitsadana/
• Gene Kim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realgenekim/

As Sara Chipps delved deeper into the world of open source and moved up into senior engineering and management roles, there was a specific skill she learned about how to work with and manage engineers.

"This is something you never get taught in school. This is something we don't stress to junior developers. This is something that senior developers learn late in their careers, is that the ability to influence the opinions of others without conflict is a superpower.

"By conflict, I don't mean not disagreeing. I'm more mean in this case, conflict of like a, a public fight or, or people getting angry or upset, like to be able to coach people through what you think is an incorrect opinion to a place where you're in agreement. It's hard, it's sometimes you're impossible, but it's an incredible skill to have.

"I love of bureaucracy and open source because that's a place that I've learned that I can be effective.

"My responsibility is identifying when people have a limiting mindset of you know, things should be this way and helping them to see the possibilities. What I've learned is that it takes time. Sometimes you have to say the same things 50 times in a row. Sometimes it doesn't work, but growing that muscle of having a message, staying on that message, learning who to identify as allies and to talk through things, that has been a really cool learning as part of my work here."

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Sara Chipps, Engineering Manager, Flagship Infrastructure, LinkedIn
• JewelBots, Craft Kits for Budding Inventors
• Girl Develop It, women and non-binary adults learn software development skills
• Girls Who Code, the world's largest pipeline of female engineers
• Robin Ginn, Executive Director at OpenJS Foundation
• OpenJS Foundation, driving broad adoption and ongoing development of key JavaScript solutions and technologies

Clyde Seepersad is the Senior Vice President & General Manager, of the Training & Certification Project at The Linux Foundation. He carries the idea with him that failure is temporary. Knowing that can help you get through some pretty intense situations. On the flip side, knowing success is temporary gives you a chance to store away some of those good feelings, which can be used to temper the struggles as the cycle plays itself out. 

Clyde doesn’t see himself as a techie. He actually has a slide in his presentations that says “I am not a techie” and it has a giant red slash through the word ‘techie’. Looking at his background, I have to agree. In 1994 he graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from the University of the West Indies in Barbados. As a Rhodes Scholar, he received his MBA from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, which is consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world. Then, in 1999, he completed his studies at the University of Oxford, receiving his Master of Science Degree in Economics for Development.