Without further ado, pass over to you.
Cool, thanks for having me.
Yeah, so I work for the EDPF Foundation
we're focused on the EDPF technology.
And what I'm going to talk to you today
is how we think about funding things
from the EDPF Foundation.
And the one thing I want to walk away from today
is thinking about not just funding individual projects,
but how can we make a whole ecosystem system successful?
Because I believe that's what makes foundations
actually successful.
And the reason why I believe that is because of this,
because on-use is the most common motivation
for people to get into open source.
I can tell you a little bit about my open source journey.
The first thing I ever did in open source
was obviously open in an issue I've get hub,
because something was working.
It wasn't working in a project that I was trying to use.
The second interaction with open source I had
was I found a broken link,
and I was actually trying to contribute a PR back.
I was trying to solve my own problems
first by opening an issue.
And then the second by actually solving my own issue
by finding the link and fixing it for everyone else.
So I guess before I go a little bit further,
I want everybody to turn to their neighbor
and tell them how they got into open source the first time.
Was it owned-use or was it something else?
OK.
I think hopefully everybody had a little bit of time
to discuss a little bit with their neighbor.
I may be able to spot a conversation
for after this talk.
But I don't have 25 minutes.
We've got to keep it moving.
I would guess in the conversations that happened out there,
at least 40% of you had the same thing.
You got in because you're trying to solve your own itch.
I think that's how a lot of people get into open source.
And I think this is super common because people are trying
to solve what they're doing.
They're trying to help themselves get what they need
to out of open source.
I may use open source for my own job.
Or as we'll see further than the presentation,
a company uses open source to own the market.
You're trying to solve your own problem
by using open source.
And I think this is the primary motivator
in a great way to drive funding in the open source ecosystem.
Because open source is kind of the buy product.
It's not the actual kind of reason.
People don't do open source because they
are trying to build something a lot of times
is because they're trying to solve a problem.
People are trying to solve problems
and not trying to create EDPF as a technology.
You're trying to solve problems within the Linux kernel.
Open source is built by people's
that are on their free time at universities,
research labs, funded by their companies
because they need to solve a specific problem
either in their life, in their professional life.
And the great thing about that is when
you're thinking about how can we fund the maintenance
of open source software?
Well, if an employer has an own use thing
for a variety of different reasons,
a lot of that maintenance can happen on the job.
How can we drive it through employers, for example,
or companies, or research institutions, or governments?
What is the own use case for getting funding into open source?
Because I think open source is really shifted in the last,
let's say, 10 years from I'm solving this to do my own company
or personal thing to more of a strategic thing.
Like how can we own the market?
How can we change things?
You can see a lot of large companies getting into open source
right now.
It's no longer just like a tactical decision.
OK, we need to have better scalability in our software system.
It's more of a strategic one.
It's how can we shape this market?
And that has brought a lot of funding into open source, too.
You can see the investments that large companies
are making into open source.
It's not side projects and home labs anymore.
It's large companies relying on this.
So in this shift from own use at a personal level,
towards own use at a strategic company level,
that brings a lot of opportunities for us
for looking for funding in the open source ecosystem.
If you think about what's really changed,
is in the early open source days, it was companies usually
adopted it because it was a way to lower their costs versus a proprietary
vendor, use the same version as somebody else.
It didn't really have a lot of business differentiation.
Whereas this more modern approach companies
are taking to open source.
Is they're looking for control of an ecosystem
at using it as a platform of innovation,
being able to fork and customize it to their own use,
their own needs that they have, or using open source as the business
model accelerator, or as the actual model itself.
So it's not just individuals' contributors, companies,
or people putting developers behind open source.
And we can see this transition happened at both the individual level
and the ecosystem level too.
So one was large companies had new scale.
They had new needs that weren't there before.
They were trying to solve the problems that they had
in their own infrastructure as they're building
at no large data centers or getting new volumes of data.
They're able to attract by their talent.
How do we recruit and retain people?
That's the own use in the personal company.
But then switching over to the strategic side,
it's also looking at how can companies control
the control ecosystems, how can they open source things
to undercut their competitors,
how can we deal with changes in the marketplace?
All this is driven a lot of companies
in a lot of funding into open source.
And so that brings me to the EVPF Foundation.
And what we do at the EVPF Foundation,
actually, how many people here have ever heard of EVPF before?
OK, I'll just in the EVPF Devrim.
So it's a big switch right now.
So I've put a slide in here to explain a little bit
about what it is.
So EVPF is a Linux kernel technology.
And what allows you to do is to hook
anywhere into the Linux kernel to change how things
are doing in a safe and very performant way.
So this is a lot of use cases and things
like networking, observability, tracing, and security.
It's really kind of like the modern way
to extend the functionality of the Linux kernel.
So you can think this has a lot of use cases for companies
internally.
The quote that people like to use is EVPF is the Linux kernel
what JavaScript is to the browser, right?
Suddenly, instead of having static web pages,
you have interactive elements that kind of
changes you interact with them.
Or in the words of Brendan Gregg,
it's EVPF gives superpowers to Linux kernel.
So kind of like this fundamental enabling
technology that does a lot of different things.
And so we can see this kind of adoption happening
in the EVPF ecosystem.
And the original way that people like companies
kind of started investing in the EVPF was this own use thing.
Like meta was building out data centers
and their load balancers weren't scaling.
So they switched to EVPF to reduce their load balancer
consumption.
Google was not being able to get the security insights
that they wanted in their infrastructure.
So they switched to EVPF to have better security insights.
A lot of new observability vendors are switching to EVPF
because it allows you to provide observability
and application code without having to make any changes
to the actual application code.
So it's a really powerful enabling technology.
And it was originally adopted by these companies
for the own use that they had.
Now, at the EVPF Foundation, that's great.
Companies are adopting that.
But that's not actually going to be
how can we encourage this whole ecosystem around it?
How can we bring not just that own use money
into our technology, into our ecosystem,
but how can we actually bring the strategic use
back into the EVPF Foundation, into the EVPF ecosystem?
And so how can we make EVPF, not just the technology
that companies are using, but the technology
that companies are betting their strategic platform
on top of?
And that's kind of what I'm going to dive into now
and how we approach funding things in the EVPF Foundation.
So before I worked at my current company,
I was actually at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation,
which is part of the Linux Foundation,
and kind of looking at that,
and a lot of other open source foundations there,
I think there's three main things
that open source foundations should do
to encourage kind of the strategic investment
into the technology.
And the three things you need to encourage
as a foundation is one the community,
two the code, and three the ecosystem.
I think there's different lovers to pull
for each of those, community code and ecosystem,
all have different things that you need to look at
and invest into to grow each of them to have,
kind of like this flywheel of innovation
and funding coming in.
And so the way that we do that at the EVPF Foundation
is the community we encourage
through face-to-face collaboration,
exactly like we're doing here coming to foster them,
or in the EVPF Devroom that's happening right now.
The second one is around the code,
how can we improve the actual upstream project
to make it more successful for everyone?
And the last one is,
how can we encourage the ecosystem,
how can we tell the story of the ecosystem,
what is the marketing angle we want to actually have
on our project?
So, kind of walking through each of those.
The first one is conferences and meetups.
So, we fund people, we fund conferences,
like this one is, I was Linux Plumber's conference,
we were sponsored that because we're in tried to encourage
the first of all the core developers
to get a face-to-face, you know,
it's, we can, the great thing about open sources,
you can work with anybody in the world,
but sometimes it's great to gather everybody in one room,
to have those conversations that don't happen otherwise.
So, we fund conferences to progress the technology.
The second thing we just launched is the meetup program.
We want to enable people to bring together
their local community.
So, spread the message of EVPF around the role.
Like, it's great to get people together.
So, funding people to host meetups in their local city.
The second part is around upstream development.
When I was talking about kind of like this own use,
every company or every individual has their own use.
They have their own bugs, they want to fix,
they have their own things they want to do.
Right? And they will invest into that
because it's in their own interest.
But, if you're looking about like kind of a project
or an ecosystem as a whole,
there's sometimes things that fall between the cracks
of all the companies interest, the personal interests,
the things that people are tackling,
but are actually be good for the whole ecosystem
as a whole, make the whole technology stronger.
So, what we do at the EVPF Foundation
is we do statements work.
We fund upstream development in a project
for the things that are critical for the project
to continue to progress,
but that no individual company kind of has the idea to invest
or the want or the need to invest into.
So, one of them was improving self-test
in the Linux kernel.
Another one is it was improving BTF,
which is BTF type format.
So, it's kind of like these glue things that help hold the project
together, make the whole developer experience better,
make it easier to work with, better to use,
but nobody individually is working on that.
That's what we can look at at the foundation
and look like, hey, what are the things that are missing,
that we can fund and can we pay people to actually do that?
Right now to make the technology better.
Another critical one is security funding.
So, I don't think I have to explain how important it is
to secure open source right now or just software in general.
So, we're investing into the security of the BTF subsystem.
So, we funded audits of, there's a couple different components,
there's a verifier, there's a jit compiler,
and we funded audits of those.
We're doing some statements of work to improve
sanitization of programs.
And the reason that we do that is when companies or customers,
if people say like, is this actually secure,
you're modifying what how the Linux kernel is actually working,
you can say yes, here's the third party audit that we've done.
This is a safe technology to adopt and something that you should put
into your stack and not only into your stack, into production,
and not only into production, but in the critical path
in your production infrastructure,
because once it's tied into how companies are functioning,
they need to have it succeed.
The next part is actually a really fun one,
which I think could be like a whole other separate talk.
That I think is really fun is we actually fund academic research grants.
So, we invest into the academic community around BTF.
And the reason why we do that is like a couple different fold.
So, one is how can we encourage more people to research,
EDPF, what are the cutting, cutting at use cases,
how what are new ways people can use the technology?
Another one is it's great to have somebody spend the whole year of their life,
you know, researching a technology,
and to be honest, PhD students are a lot less expensive than security researchers.
Yeah, and once people kind of start getting invested into it,
it's also good for the companies in the ecosystem,
because people have spent a year or four years of their life researching a technology
while they're pretty in a good position to be hired too.
And it's kind of creating this flywheel around academia
into the actual ecosystem too.
So, people research it, and then they contribute to the upstream project,
they have new use cases, they have new ways to do it.
And it's actually really cool.
We actually saw a lot of talks at Linux Plumber's conference
and at the EDPF Devrim funded by the work that we did in the academic community.
Beyond just kind of like the academic work, we also found
a fun community building fellowships.
So, these are people going out and writing the labs, the blogs,
the tutorials, all the different things that people need to get started,
use the technology be successful with it.
You know, like, I'm one person, I can only go to, I don't know,
so many conferences here, I can only talk to so many people,
but once you're able to fund other people to go out and do the advocacy work,
then you can really expand your reach as a foundation
as a technology, as an ecosystem.
And then the last part is around the marketing material.
It's not only, you know, getting people together,
talking about the technology progressing it.
It's not just about how good as our code.
It's actually being able to tell the story of your technology.
Why is it so important?
Why should companies invest it?
Why should individuals look at it?
And so we've done a lot of that too.
And what we've done at the foundation is target a broad variety of different audiences,
because not all marketing material speaks to every single audience.
We've targeted developers, we've targeted platform leaders, we targeted senior IP decision makers.
We're also looking at now targeting investors and executive leadership teams.
And so a couple of different things that we do is,
like, one, actually, my favorite projects that I've ever done,
and if you are an open source project,
is doing a documentary about how the technology came to be.
And it's telling the backstory.
Like people believe in stories and they want to get invested in something
where they feel like they know the people and the individuals.
And this is a great way to kind of tell the story of the technology and how it came to be.
Right, what was the own use that inspired it and how did people get excited about it?
Like, that's what inspires people.
The next one is actually doing case studies.
You know, like, here are the production numbers.
When data dog was able to switch for the EVPF for observability.
Here's the reduction in latency and overhead that they had.
When metaswitch to EVPF for profiling,
here's the reduction in CPU they're able to find.
And then the last part is like more high-level, like white papers.
It's like, you know, strategically EVPF is going to be critical for the infrastructure platform
and being able to talk to a higher-level audience too.
So it's targeting your marketing messages at multiple different audiences.
So they each all believe that EVPF is critical to the future of their technology,
to their stack, and what they're able to do.
So once they bring it in, they have their own use.
And they start investing into the upstream,
both through code, contributions through advocacy through funding too.
So that's kind of how we're thinking about it at the EVPF Foundation.
Now, this is where Patrick is supposed to come in and talk about self-sustainability
in practice at foundation.
So how can you also bring money into the foundations?
This is a list of things.
You also recorded this talk or a section of the talk.
So if you want to see it on YouTube afterwards, go check it out.
It was great to work with them on this talk.
I can let anybody who wants to take a photo, take a photo so they have this link.
Also, both of these slides afterwards too.
Yeah, and with that, like, when you're thinking about funding projects in open source,
I think you shouldn't just think about your project.
Think about the ecosystem as a whole.
How can we make something so critical to individuals
to a company's own use that they need to have the technology be successful?
They need to have the ecosystem be successful,
and they can build their projects on top of it.
Because I think that's what will encourage people and companies
to continue investing into open source.
So, thank you.
Any questions?
There's one over here.
Hi. Thank you for the nice presentation.
I noticed that you talk a lot about how actually companies can make great use of open source software,
so ask the maintainers and developers of open source software
can actually get some funding out of it.
Which is how things work I understand.
What I would like you to know your opinion or address is that
is this shift that you've been explaining in your presentation?
Do you believe it's in the right direction as forces consent?
Because to me, it sounds that we only have to work on projects
that companies can make use of it,
which means they can somehow benefit of it.
And the rest of the project might not be that I would like to hear your opinion, please.
Yeah, definitely.
I think that's a great question.
I think this is why maybe it's hard to talk about like,
fossil's a whole. One of my favorite books about this is not the egg bombs book,
about invisible infrastructure.
And I think she does a really great job laying out the different types of open source projects.
And it's not like open source is like one size fits all.
You know, everything from like, I just have like this individual's
a project that I just used by myself and I just posted on GitHub to, you know,
like the Linux kernel. And that's like a really broad range of projects.
Like my experience is like more closer towards like the Linux kernel.
I mean, it is the Linux kernel side. So it's like, which is like the largest open source
project in the world. And then also I work on like silly on two, which is the second largest
one in the cloud native computing foundation behind Kubernetes. So like I'm thinking more about
those types of projects just because that's what my experience is with.
Like I do think on that end of it, it is good to have companies investing more into it.
Like for example, in the VPF subsystem, like most of its maintained by meta. And they have like
a massive kernel team and they pay people just to work on an upstream kernel. So like in that sense,
it's like there are maintainers that are the project that are being paid full time by companies
to work on that. I know this is not applicable to all of open source. I was just kind of like talking
from I guess my experience and maybe I should have carried out that a little bit. I don't think
this is advice for every single type of project. Right. VPF is something that's in the Linux kernel.
And a lot of companies are relying on it now. And that's good for EVPF because then they
have to continue to invest into it. Like not a hired all of those people to work on VPF
because it's critical to their whole stack. Right. And so all those people of jobs, which I think
is in general cool on it. Like they're sharing their things upstream that other people can use it to.
Yeah. Did that kind of answer some of your question?
Yeah. Do you get a reply to a question for me? What do other ways to do?
Yeah. It's like I think companies coming in to open source is good and bad. It's like another
route for funding. And I think there's multiple ways to fund open source. This is one of them.
Thank you so much. Firstly, I also love Nayak Bosburg working in public and the
you mentioned the four organizational strategies. I'm sorry working in public is a name.
Based on ratio of users and contributors. Yeah. So there's like toys, stadiums, federation and clubs.
Yeah. Exactly. Really nice. For those case studies that you mentioned,
or you talk about the kind of enterprise use cases and the results,
it's curious to know where you get the data from. Do you reach out to those companies?
Like those are powerful stories to tell. Right. But I mentioned it's really hard to get accurate data.
Yeah. I reach out to the companies. I actually gave a talk about this last year at
Boston in the community room. So I would check out that because it kind of lays out the whole approach
that I have to do there and how I did it for not the EVP Foundation but for the Silicon project.
But it's similar type of thing. Yes. And that that's a whole talk.
Thanks for your talk. When you do trademark licensing for others. How do you do that?
And which whites do it? And gives to whom? If you can give me an example here,
just as mentioned here. You're talking about on this slide, right? Yeah.
I would go watch Patrick's talk because that's his half of the talk. And I don't want to
Yeah. But like for example, from when I was working at CNCF, like an example that they use was
like the certified Kubernetes conformance program. And you can only say like you're certified
Kubernetes if you're like a member of CNCF. But yeah, also watch Patrick's half of the talk too.
Any more? Okay, thanks for coming.