Hello everybody, greetings from Open Simulator Community Conference 2019. I'm told I'm my moderators, so get down the way. Most years we have a panel about viewers here, and of course viewers, in fact there aren't too many changes since last year. Viewers are of course all about communication and that can be communication between different worlds, different platforms. In the case of worlds we have things like the hybrid grid, but there are many other platforms around these days. Now the discussion of, I believe there's a discussion coming up, where pitching the idea of virtual worlds against virtual reality, which could be interesting, they've made a boxing ring for it. I thought this year we would actually step away from Open Sim directly and actually look at the future of social virtual worlds. What we often call the metaverse, though arguably the metaverse, if you listen to people like Will Burns, is a great deal bigger than just a bunch of social worlds. And in the spirit, I should say really of Open Sim, I mean the real place to look is probably open source, though in fact the panel I have here today is a sort of a mixture of open source and proprietary, but we will come to that. Let me introduce the folks I've got with us, just to get that out of the way too. Sitting next to me on this couch is Adam Frisbee. Now Adam Frisbee is the CEO or, well actually it's not CEO is it, that's, oh anyways, it's just science-based. Science-based is an interesting platform. It's also in unity and it has a standalone client, but it is also available on the web, you know, it was this sort of plug-in, it's not quite the same, but you can basically use the same instance on the web. And the other notable thing about Adam himself is that he was the founder of Open Sim or what, the founders of Open Sim himself. So we wouldn't be here today, would we Adam, if it wasn't for you and later on the course Pista, which basically changed the world of everything. So Adam certainly knows what Open Sim is all about as well. Now on my other side, I have two guests on my, hang on, where is my left and right here, I'm looking at it the wrong way around. Yeah, on my far left. We have Blair McKinter. Blair McKinter is from Mozilla Hubs. He works for Mozilla effectively, which you all know of course the Firefox, the web browser, and Mozilla of course have a long history of open source. I think of Mozilla Hubs as a bit like a kind of very modern VRML, in other words it appears in the browser.  And you know, I'd have to have stories, but I think it took them more than about five minutes, very intuitive, very easy to use. So, welcome Blair. Welcome Blair. And also, Ghoster Smith. Now, Ghoster interestingly, I came across him because of his involvement in a talk show called Endgame, of which I personally like, although he's been involved with lots of others too. It's Endgame is actually produced and broadcast from VRChat. And I know that VRChat is probably the biggest in terms of volume of users of all the virtual worlds. I'm not quite sure why, because especially when it first came alive, I thought all that will stay primitive compared to even second life. But in fact, when you get into it, it's quite a lot more complicated because of his broadcasting side of things. Ghoster actually gave me a little tour of the sets, you know, they used to film. And also it showed me how easy it is for you to take any environment you're in and literally create your own proxy of it. So, you know, if I go into a studio, I can actually sort of create a second instance of that same studio empty that then I can use myself, which is, well, I don't know how they handle copyright on builds, but we will come to that. So welcome, Ghoster. Hello. Now, as I said, I'd like you, obviously, the team here is to talk about the future of virtual worlds and you have all very good representatives of that. But obviously, you know, I do expect you're going to comment a little bit about your own platforms, too. It's actually been quite a hit week because there was some major news from another world, high fidelity during the week. And coincidentally, I have a panel this time tomorrow talking about the uses for the open source version of high fidelity, which is by and large unaffected by the plight of high fidelity, the platform as it exists. But not totally, in other words, a lot of work needs to be done to set up independent, you know, networking, maybe a new thing that is resembling the hybrid, even though it won't be a good set. So all these are kind of changes. Now, before we came on air, I happen to mention Discord, which is another one of these things. I'd like to start with Discord. I know you're all on it. Discord is not a world, but it's like Skype, but better, and it's like IRC built into this, and that's better. But it was sort of built for, they describe it as gamers, but I mean, we all know that virtual world users are akin to gamers, even if we're not playing games after time. Discord has an in game overlay system, which means that, for example, I could be here using Firestorm, and I can see people I know on Discord, and they could be not here in OpenSim, they could be in, I don't know, high fidelity, or any other world that has a Discord channel. And through the overlay system, one can communicate with them. So it's like having an IM system that is on screen on top of the world I'm playing, which allows for interoperability in terms of communication. I'd like to start you all off before I talk us into the ground about your thoughts on the importance of communication and any ideas you have and the way your own platform streaks it. I'll start with you, Adam, I think, because in your case, it's probably fairly straightforward. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question. I mean, obviously, my background does have some love for open standards and trying to make things compatible with each other. When we built the instant messaging for ScienceBase, we actually looked at what standards there were out there, and we ended up building off the top of something called XMPP, which is a pre-opened protocol for cross-platform or cross-server communications and IAMs. It's certainly possible as a platform developer to open it up to having third-party communications going across worlds, and it'd be lovely if that standard exists. The problem is that there's no commercial incentive to do so because the people who would benefit from it are not the people who have the users. If you've got, for instance, let's say second life, you've got maybe half a million active users there who log in each month, you don't want to open up communication with a smaller competitor because it's not commercially a good idea for you. It makes it easier to, it lowers the barrier to people leaving their social network. So it's a bit of a perverse standard that I mean, when you're working entirely in the open source space, that it doesn't matter so much because there's no sort of, it's not a zero-sum game. But I think that there is ways of working around this one. Discord is actually a great example of using the overlays and things to sort of bypass the limitations that the platform providers put on their users. And I think that, I mean, if you want to talk about encouraging it, that's the way to go because it's something that it doesn't matter what the platform provider says that it's not going to just happen anyway. I think we've all been like that in the past. If we're on a platform that doesn't provide what we want, some of us at least will go and find what we want elsewhere and just run it concurrently or on the second screen or something. Blair, with Mozilla as well, this is obviously fairly acute, isn't it? Hubs very much provides an environment, but it's not exactly loaded with heads-up displays and interfacing tools, is it? So I imagine someone like Discord comes in quite important there. Well, so Hubs has its own in-world chat and so on. I think the big difference with Hubs from some of the other systems is Hubs's design was designed, the team would say privacy first. So you can create rooms, you can create scenes in an editor or anything that let good GLTF. You can create a room from that scene in Hubs, but there's no notion of lobbies or one big virtual world with a communication channel, right? So Hubs, then if you have a room, you can share the link with anyone, anyone can join the room just by going to that link or whatever browser they want. Things like Discord come in when you want to have some additional chat and control. So Hubs integrates with Discord, it'll undoubtedly integrate with other chat systems in the future like Slack or Teams or something, but the goal there is to leverage the power and the infrastructure of Discord to do things like entry control, moderation, that sort of thing. So Hubs in of itself doesn't have a lot of that, it has some facilities for it, but it turns around and relies on things like Discord for those facilities. Sure. So it's a bit of a different model, right? Yeah, it's a different model, but I'm already seeing in your answer all those different parallels there with what Adam was saying about it. It is always possible to plug these external systems in, assuming of course that the external systems are stable and reliable themselves, you don't want to integrate them and then they go away. I think the interesting difference is that because Hubs is based on Open Protocols underneath, it would be fairly easy to bridge a Hubs chat even if it was, regardless of what it's using, over to any system and pull together. If that system allowed bridging, which as Adam says is possible and likely. Yeah, well over and beyond that aspect of communication, of course what we call, well we certainly hear, called teleporting and I guess really the way Hubs is at the moment, each room you join or each environment you join with a link is going to open up in the browser as a separate tab. It's the only way you can actually follow a link to a hub and then find a door in that hub that will immediately teleport you to another hub and keep it in the same tab or is it? Yeah, yeah, so you can, right. Within a Hubs, so within Hubs you can take, if you're on the desktop client for example, desktop client in a desktop browser, you can paste things or you can create links in World and if you click on them, just like in an old browser, you follow the link to that room and it loads up that room and you start it. So you can jump from link to link to link, just like you would on any web page. Right, and indeed the way we do here with the Ibogrid, we jump from grid to grid in the same viewer. Once you're in on your home grid, that's your base and you can jump wherever you want. Okay, Ghoster, now I was actually kind of mind boggled when I came over to the Endgame Studios because you immediately, well not immediately, but eventually you showed me how that I can quite literally take a copy of the studio and create a new instance for it. Now I know in Science Space Adam uses this idea of InstaZinc too, but as a user it's probably as well remarkable because you know in the world of copy protection and everything else, the fact that I could click on the whole environment and copy it. Open a new instance. Yeah, so the thing with VRChat as a whole, as it's not as open source as some of these other programs here, they do require you to just basically do a checkbox to say, hey, this is your own content, you're not using copyrighted stuff, that sort of thing to protect themselves. I'm not going to say there isn't, but there's definitely a lot of copyrighted items on VRChat, but the idea of the InstaZinc, I assume, has been around for a long time, especially in a bunch of games where you can create lobbies, multiple different lobbies, and being a single one without hundreds and thousands of players of everyone online in your own instance. And the other thing I wanted to just quickly touch on Discord real quick is more of a user side of that. It actually is very nice to use because it shows, hey, you're playing this game, hey, you can join this call, hey, you can watch. You have so much integration to many pieces of content and games and social programs from Discord, and you can even set up your own custom bots like, hey, so-and-so is getting online, hey, there's a vent, you can click this link, you can do web hooks, different things like that, share images, videos. So even just having Discord, if you're not going to use it for all of its features, it's just a nice chatting program and an upgrade from some of the older stuff. But I must admit, on my Mac, the main thing I use now, I've got various virtual vessels, but I have two windows on my own screen, and on my left, I have Discord, and on my right, I have a browser, I better not say which browser, well, I'm here. I'm complete with plugins and sidebars and everything, and there's almost nothing I can't do between those, and for every link or two I'm following and tweeting about on the web, I'm just switching my attention to the left and clicking on groups and news streams coming in through Discord, and the only thing that competes with that slightly is Slack, but Slack is more limited to my own affairs. It's also a paid platform, so you do have a monthly subscription on Slack? Yes, absolutely. Well, I don't know, I mean, the free version is very limited, yeah. It's good for personal use, but not for you. It's expensive if you want to run it from an enterprise point of view, I think. But so is Microsoft's new copy, copycats, teams, cattle over there. Oh yeah, well, they'll copy anything, won't they? If they see money there, they'll be it. Yeah, the trouble is, Windows is so ubiquitous, you know, they'll get a whole layer of people signing up for that, you've never even heard of Slack, even though it's probably the better. Well, I think they're different, right? I mean, I use Teams and Slack and Discord for different things, and they all have different features. Teams is amazing in its features if you're in that ecosystem, which we are at Church Attack, for example, where I'm at the right. Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of people may ever have used Slack and various other things, but they are doing it because they work in some kind of enterprise, where in that situation, you choose the tool set for the job, independent of things like personal preferences. I might not even be using virtual worlds, you know. Okay, now, I mean, we've had lots of discussions before about interoperability. And more and more, it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen. And of course, now, we're getting to the point where people are actually saying that, you know, VR itself, the inverted commas referring to hardware and headsets and stuff like that, is kind of running out of steam. Now, I think the Oculus is an HTC 5 and all that stuff. They are sort of expanding, but oddly enough, it's in the enterprise and, you know, surgeons and in, you know, in business. As for people using it at home, if you're a gamer, I find a lot of gamers have latched onto Oculus in particular. But outside of the gaming environment, it really isn't taking off.  That's just a big TV screen in your face, you know, a bit like some of the 360 video. But increasingly, a lot of that hype about VR, maybe I hope it's the wrong word, did actually shift the focus of what's going on into the spectacle, as it were, of what you can get with a headset and away from the social side of what we call social virtual worlds. Places like here and or your platforms where, you know, people can communicate, they can do things together, they can visit things together that are being created in those worlds and they can collaborate most of the time together on different things. And although I've seen instances of things that you can use in a headset to do painting or to build and stuff like that, it's not, it's not the same thing, you know, and I'm one of these people, I hardly ever go into a headset to be honest, I've been, you know, I've been one of these people and just said, you know, the platform is the first thing, you know, if I can go in in a headset, if I can go in on an iPad or an iPhone or an Android phone, if I can go in on the desktop, all that is fine. But whatever is available to me, I want to be able to get to that world with whatever is available to me. So I might want to go into a world quickly, when I'm out and about with a phone, or I might just want to go in simply on the desktop because I really don't want that, you know, 100% immersion where I can't hear or see anything in the real world at the same time. You know, so you've got these degrees of things. And some people have actually said, of course, that headsets and VR contraption far from being good for social things like social worlds is actually anti-social, because you sit in a room often with other people around with your headset on and you can't hear them see them or anything. So it must be crazy. Yeah, exactly. It's a bit of a contradiction. I do love the videos you see of people wearing headsets and doing things that they don't realize. How in a very, very general sense, right?  I mean, we've covered communication, obviously, of interoperability amongst what I would say is the social platforms. And well, one thing I'm not going to bring up in this question, but I'm going to bring up afterwards is the likelihood of Facebook jumping into this and taking the whole thing over. But for the moment, do you just see any avenue of interoperability, even if it's five, ten years down the line? Sorry, was that one for me? It's for all of you, actually. But yeah, it starts as well. I'll barge in and ask that one. I think the answer is that you're going to see interoperability in parts, not whole. So for instance, up until now, the standard format for transferring a 3D file from one program to another has typically been FBX. It's the one that almost every package supports. And it's got a good superset of the features that you want in a 3D model translation. That's now moving to something called GLTF. As far as I know, most of the newer virtual worlds are at least paying lip service to GLTF support. We have it. I know others have it as well. I know Hubs, I think, is GLTF-based exclusively. So that's, for instance, one way that we'll get some degree of portability. We will find that the 3D formats for uploading files will be standardized if we're going to take those from one to another. How much further that progresses? I don't know. I think that the thing you're going to look for is that there's got to be a commercial incentive for this to happen, for it to happen. It's rather, I mean, in some respects, it's a little bit disappointing, because when the web first appeared, I mean, it started as an open standard, and the commercialization of it happened later, rather than the way around. And that gave a completely different set of priorities and incentives that really did encourage the idea of having everything open and transferable. You could always look at the source code for a web page, those kinds of things. I think that there's some disadvantages to trying to do that now. And one of them is the increasing complexity of all the tools and requirements to actually get content going. You can do basic level content on your own as an amateur pretty easily, but to sort of do the professional high-end work that people are beginning to expect in games, particularly high-end games, I mean, there's huge amounts of skills and all the rest of it that need to be transferred, and I have completely wandered off topic. But no, no, no, I'm tall. Yeah, but my point is that I think that we're going to come to the interoperable standards by being dragged to it. It's not going to be something that's starting out as the thing. What's going to happen is that you're going to have someone who works in two worlds simultaneously, and they're paying customers of both, and they say, all right, I want to actually use my work from A and B and B and A, and that's going to force the companies to at least do some important export options that can work between the two. That's how it's going to happen. It's not going to happen any other way, I don't think, because as I said, the incentive structure is not right there to support it. The alternative would be if something became incredibly popular that was open sourced and did have those correct incentive schemes, but I think in today's discoverability market, that's really difficult. Doing advertising at the moment, for instance, is quite expensive, and you have to go through people like Google and Facebook and everyone else to do that, and that costs a lot of money. Organic discoverability is very difficult to do. That's part of my fear about the Facebook thing. I think maybe the ubiquity of something will come. If everybody wants to be part of it, they want to have a Twitter account, they want to be on Facebook and all this stuff. I was on Twitter at the very beginning, and that must have been on it for five years before it became a household name, like it is now. I sent out newsfeeds on it. That's what we were all doing amongst each other now. It's become something totally different, but I keep wondering if back in the early days of Second Life, we were talking about the metaverse and this interactive thing where we can all meet. Of course, the technology that took off at the time was mobile phones, smartphones, because it was convenient. Everybody has a Facebook account, everybody has a mobile phone. If somebody comes along that says everybody needs a virtual environment, like I once asked Microsoft, were they ever considering a room system in 3D for their desktop? Because it made sense, instead of having a desktop picture and icons, you could actually have a room where the icons were objects that you clicked and doors you could walk through, somehow a sitting room to a library and the different programs would be in situ. I don't think that's going to happen, but just say it did. Everybody would want that. Now, I imagine with the right promotion, something like hubs could get there, but again, I'm worried about Facebook because nobody's really started, you've got Miwi and things, but nobody's really starting a new Facebook, because Facebook itself has become the ubiquitous thing and nobody wants to start all that again or download more software and be running five different Facebook alternatives at once. But if Facebook came up with this thing of every Facebook member having an interactive 3D page and moving from there, I hate to think what it would look like with all the answers. They have announced that. That's what Facebook lies in. Exactly. Yeah, which is the sum of all our fears is what I say, but let me move on to guest and player on this general topic. Do you see any threads, as it were, where at least a degree of interoperability might come to social worlds? So I'll jump in. I think you probably want to take it at multiple levels. When you started the question, you were talking about accessing it from different devices. I want to get in the world from whatever device and the device you might want to use might depend on your situation. Right here in my home office with the door closed, I would be perfectly happy to be in a VR display because there's nobody around. But if I was in a cafe, that's a very different story or if I was on a train. And then there's the content interoperability, which I think is what Adam was mostly talking about. There's all the other interoperability, right? Like the stuff that OpenSim has dealt with in terms of trying to bring together different worlds with one client and so on. In some ways, the first one is just a software issue. So with hubs, it runs in a browser. So it already is accessible from every device. We ran a conference, a remote conference participation set up at the ACM WIST conference this year. And I was chatting with one of the people in the room. He was like, yeah, I was at home and I used my Quest. But I've watched most of the talks because I've been watching them while I commute in the morning. He was in Sweden and the conference was in New Orleans. I've been watching them on my iPhone on the train and I was talking to him on the desktop or in my VR gear. So I think within a world, the multi-device stuff is possible and lots of platforms like VRChat are trying to do that. The content stuff will happen. But I do agree also with what Adam said that the interoperability, especially at the messaging and interaction level, that'll be really hard.  Facebook doesn't even allow you to access the feed externally anymore. And post externally, you have to go through their client or the webpage. So you're right that there's these strong incentives to deal with that last level of interop where they really could interop. But I think it's interesting you were saying that does Microsoft allow a 3D desktop? Well, in some ways, that's what the Cliff House and Microsoft Mixed Reality and their VR headset, that's what HoloLens has right now, which is you put icons, you put windows, you put them in 3D around you and you can go with that. So I think the interesting part with interop is going to be when is going to be in the VR and AR head-mount space where you're already in 3D effectively and then you're jumping from one 3D world to another. And that's where the interesting stuff I think is going to be. So you really think the headset thing is still going to be the future out on domestic users front, shall we say? Eventually. Eventually. I mean, there's actually, you know, I was going to resisted jumping in when you were pooping them. The desktop VR connected devices, the Vive, the Rift, the Index and so on, those haven't seen marketable growth. There's a lot of goes and quests that have been sold. And when you move outside of Europe and North America and move into the Asian countries, for example, there's a ton of people using VR devices. The primary use is what you were describing, which is video, but there's like video. Co-watching, there's, and it's because you live in a crowded environment, you want to be able to watch and experience. I'm laughing because I recently acquired a Facebook portal. It's the three of them, tablets and whatever, but I versioned the plugs into a TV via HDMI. And it's got a camera that follows you about, but you can't Skype on it or Discord on it. You can only use Facebook Messenger. And it's got the video sharing in, but you can't share any video online. It's got to be a video that's at Facebook, copy YouTube or something. So you spend your money on this thing, and then you're trapped in an ecosystem that actually to me doesn't provide anything useful, but it's typical, I guess. Goster, your thoughts on the sense of interoperability that may come? Well, I know definitely, especially in the VR community, when VR chat was kind of having some issues that there was a big talk about trying to make some interconnected hub of platforms. So you can go to, like, all the different VR platforms, social platforms at the time, which were, like, alt space, rec room, VR chat, Neo's VR hadn't really taken off at that point. Pavlov, onward, different types of those games that allow multiplayer to basically have a single interconnected hub where you could just walk through a door or click a button and go to that world. I don't know what happened to it, that idea, but there has definitely been a big push, especially in the VR community, to find some kind of way to connect the platforms together in some meaningful way.  Certain aspects of it, like I believe Adam was saying, it's just not financially feasible, because any game that has a big community associated with a smaller community through a hub of some kind will either lose some of their users for the features that that other platform has, or they will gain a very limited number of users by doing it. So having something that you have to, you know, join for. I wonder if that will be the case as time goes by. I mean, I remember, I have a content management system that I use called Close with a Z. And when I first started using it, you know, all my posts on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and stuff all came in in a highly organized manner, show me who they were from, you know, and, you know, I get tweets and LinkedIn posts from the same person group together, it would work all that out for me. And then suddenly everything to do with Facebook disappeared. And it means that now if I want to check up on Facebook, I have to log into Facebook. You know, you can't get at your feed or your friends through any other method. It's not curated for you anymore. Yeah, but I just wondered down the line, if this is going to be an obstacle, you can have, you know, we got everybody in the planet is in Facebook. But slowly, I mean, people are realizing they don't have time to spend 24 hours a day in Facebook. They need another way to get, you know, that information out quickly. And if something like Facebook forbids it effectively, I wonder if over time, people would begin to think, you know, God, I'm wasting so much time in there for something that, you know, I can't get the information out of, I can't aggregate it in any way, except by going in there.  Like if I want to take something from Facebook, I want to have it. I could either download it to my computer or I could share the direct link. And what the problem is, if I share the direct link, you know, nothing against Facebook, you have to log in to Facebook to sometimes see those things. Or, you know, I want to share it from a different platform. The, as we, as the Internet grows older, I would definitely say that more and more likely there will be core programs or core features that will slowly do this integration work that allows you to go from one place to the other. And there will slowly become less and less variance out there. So, you know, how like we had Skype and Skype was big, you know, 10, 15 years ago, whenever it was, and now Discord's the new big and upcoming chatting voice program. They're slowly going to phase out the ones that don't have the features that 90% of the people don't want or want and kind of consolidate down. And that's what we're looking for. Especially you, you would sort of agree with me that kind of the Internet generation of one, I'm not, but I think I am. You know, we want everything and we want it now kind of thing. So, we want that convergence of data, you know, in our face. So, we actually, the last thing we want is a platform that tries to trap us in it and limit the data we can get our hands on. Yeah. Yeah. It's, the best comparison I can make is if anyone has, you know, Steam, Bethesda, Epic Store, Origin, all these different platform launchers to just play a single thing. Yeah. And most people, they just agree that Steam is probably the best one because it's got most of the games that you'd want. It has a launcher, it has a decent interface. They recently updated it like a month ago to look better and function five times better as well. So, consolidating the one platform is probably going to be the way it goes. I think I actually had to download Steam to get to yours. Yes. Although, actually, I realize now I can, I do actually have where the Oculus goes, that's my condescension. And I think I can get to be addressing that too, if I remember. And going back to the point, sorry, real quick of, you know, using different headsets, as I believe Adam or Blair was mentioning, there are many, many games, especially in the VR community, who are trying that. They're trying to get as much interconnectability with different platforms. So, whether you're using, you know, the Quest or an Oculus or the Go or the Samsung VR or a Vive or any hodgepodge of made up systems that you can make on your own, as long as it works and it follows this API protocol, you can connect it. So, especially with custom controllers. Okay, we're coming down to what is probably going to be about the last 10 minutes. I've got a ton of questions here. At the moment here in OpenSim, there is, we're almost waiting for a new standard of viewer, you know, a much more updated system for actually viewing the code. We have guys in you on that front this year. But one thing that is very obvious is that people don't react well to some forms of change. In other words, you know, if this changes in an interface, they're not too happy because there's a learning curve in learning the new bits. But it gets worse in what we're talking about, you know, a greater metaverse. You know, if I go into science space, or I go into hubs, or I go into VR chat, the tool set for navigation and doing things, the whole interface is a new thing to be learned. And I wonder in my mind, how many worlds can I be in when every one of them has got a different interface, you know? Fortunately, the arrow keys tend to work in most worlds. And if they don't, I've got WASD and stuff. But I think you know what I mean. You know, for the more interesting things we can do, every world, every platform seems to invent its own kind of tool set that doesn't necessarily follow the other ones.  Oh, which world am I in? What keys do I use? They're not the same. Now, Marcus, who's in charge of streams here, actually, has actually said in chat, he kind of had to know about performance challenges for hubs with regard to JavaScript and WebGL. And then he says maybe Adam's experience of trying to use Unity on the web. That's actually going beyond that question. That leads me into something else I was going to come to. One thing that we've been able to say about OpenSim here, actually, is that despite slicker-looking platforms and everything else like that, it remains a very good, not only collaboration platform, because of what you can do in real time on the spot, but also a general creativity platform. I can make a build here or do things here that I can do with the in-world tools. And then I can export those things. And I can export them in a format that will then allow me to put them in Science Space or rather, Unity in Science Space's case, or I can bring them in to hubs.  So, although this isn't interoperability in in-situ, so to speak, I mean, for creative teams and things like that, an individual platform, especially like OpenSim here, can actually be the key, even though you may be creating something that you deploy as a standalone scene somewhere else on the web page or in a particular other world. Unity, in particular, I know Adam here uses Unity as the Austrian platform for Science Space, but I mean, I think people in VR chats and hospice, presumably, might well be using Unity for components. Let me move to Blair for that in case. Unity is the main editor format where you can assemble the worlds. And then there's actually an SDK that VRChat provides, which allow you to upload to their server so that you can, you know, access the content. So we have to use the Unity editor to put stuff in. There is no, like, Unreal Engine editor or custom editor that we use. Yeah, but effectively, I could build a TV studio and I could build it here in OpenSim. I could then export it and it could be, you know, I could have the same studio, the same look of it in Science Space and in VRChat and possibly hubs, Blair. I mean, hubs, so hubs right now, rims are GLTFs and they're created with a, there's an editor called Spoke, which you just can get to from the front page. And it allows you to assemble content in all kinds of different formats into a room scene and specify the metadata if you want, like, you know, landing zones and stuff. So anything that you can export to GLTF, you could use to author, I mean, there are people who offer in Unity and use their GLTF exporters. With the 2.8 update to Blender, there's been a lot more people starting to use Blender for things, which is really interesting. I haven't been able to convince myself to learn it yet, who has time. So I think there's a lot of that. I mean, the really interesting thing for me, I think, is that Unity is actually, it's the in-world editing tools. Where is the sweet spot? Right. The problem with Blender and Unity and so on is that they're not novice friendly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And whereas, so I've been at Mizzone for three years on leave from Georgia Tech, but I'm a professor and years ago, when Second Life open sourced their client, we made an augmented reality version of the Second Life client, which we, initially because we wanted to do AR Peshinama, and that seemed like a good platform for it. But we had many islands over the years, over a large number of years for research projects. And it was just, I haven't seen anything that feels sort of this similar sweet spot that you mentioned of being able to edit as a novice. Unity and Blender don't do that. Yeah, I'm going to be focused. I've already got the flies. Okay. The other thing I had that is related to this at one point is not only just say I built a studio, a TV studio or something in OpenCM, and I dropped it into Unity for a bit of conversion or whatever, and then I uploaded it into Science Space and did the same in VR chat. Back on the interoperability, I thought, well, if that's instance, that build, as it were, that I'm going to deploy on various platforms, having authored it in one and converted it for the others. If there could be, say, scripts running in that studio, JavaScript, or whatever, and those could be converted to, do you think it might be possible where we're going to start building things that could be in worlds or on the web that will, the objects themselves will be able to communicate with each other independently of where they are. So somebody's sitting in the copy of my studio that's on, say, the web somewhere, and somebody sitting is in a standalone virtual client could sort of communicate that could be like chat bridges and various display systems that are replicated in all the different instances of the thing I've built. I need a quickie answer to that from each of you. Well, that's a complicated question, but I think you know what I'm saying. I know that there is such thing as the web RTC, real-time communication, which can be used for both voice and video. And if you have the right setup, you can use like a special shader that works across multiple platforms to give it that ability for you to be sitting in one instance of it, let's say in science space, and for it to be broadcasted to any of the other platforms that support that said shader. So it is possible right now it's just a problem of getting support into the different platforms. Sure. I mean, I think to go to the question of especially interactivity is something that's going to kill you because the language is one thing. It's the APIs and other stuff that are the real rubber hits the road. So I find it hard to imagine having interactive content across many disparate platforms for the reasons that Adam mentioned at the beginning. There's the business models of these large platforms. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very much thinking of the creators here because I'm well, I've got history and creativity, but I can't do any of this. I mean, I'm a user and as Adam will tell you, as soon as I tried to make a studio in science space, I spent five minutes in university and just gave up. Some people can do it, but it's the learning curve again, it's beyond me at the moment. So I tend to focus while I'm doing what I'm talking about here in terms of being a user. I want things to be nice easily and connected to actually use. I did have more questions, but I'm beginning to look at the time here and I think I'm going to have to start rounding up before they actually poke me in the chat. I'd like to ask each of you to finish on as it were and, you know, 90 seconds or something to try and put your own platform into the background for a second and give me your impression of how you think what we call the metaverse or the future of social worlds is going. You know, in the very general sense, forget the interface devices, forget the particular platforms or whatever, but, you know, how you think it would develop over, I don't know, a year or 10 years or whatever. I'll put you on the spot there, haven't I? Let me start with, who's going to be first? So I tend to be, I've been thinking about this from a VR and AR head-mount perspective, right? And lately, and when you look at it from that viewpoint, you can imagine that any whichever shell you're using, whichever top-level thing, is essentially your entry into the metaverse and all the different platforms are essentially a part of it, right? So if you go watch Ready Player One or read a book like that, each of those worlds in the Oasis could be thought of as, one of them could be VR chat, could be a web page, and you're bouncing between them the top-level interface, which is your desktop on your Windows or Mac and it's your shell and whatever, is kind of like the home there, right? It's like we don't think of it that way because when I'm on my desktop, it's 2D and I'm sitting in my room, but if you look at the VR versions like that, it starts to feel that way. So, you know, and that, taken from that viewpoint, with something like Hubs or other open-source web-based things, the web is just one of the programs that is hosting one of the worlds that you're visiting, and it might have certain features like, you know, Hubs will allow you to do self-hosting soon, where you can be running your entire virtual world yourself with your own control over it. That's one slice, but VR chat gives you a different set of advantages. Another thing to be... That's indeed as well. The other things we have in open-source, I mean, my own region has to by a company called Outworlds and basically it's on my own computer. So, my simulator, my assets and everything is on my own computer and I just hypergrid out to where I want and come back when I'm finished. Adam, you're a response to that question too, maybe? Yes. Yeah, no, I actually, I very much agree with that. That's the direction things are going to go. The problem right now with delivering 3D content, if we think about this in a much more general terms, delivering 3D content right now is an absolute dog's breakfast. We have the latest AAA games. Each of those has built their own 3D engine. They've built their own rendering pipelines. They have built their own content streaming. They've built their own all those bits and pieces. They have built themselves completely unnecessarily. The reason is we lack a standard. We lack a way of being able to actually get all the last mile of energy out of the graphics card, which is why they build engines. It's why they do those things. But sometime in the future, at some point, we actually are going to settle on standards. We are going to have a standard 3D model format. We're going to have a standard system for loading assets. We're going to have a standard for all those things and it's not a big step from us being able to take that and then actually associate that with over the internet. So that everything just sort of streams down onto the device you're accessing in a very standardized way so that the important differentiator between all these 3D applications and whatever they are is the content that's associated with them, the content, the scripts and things like that, rather than the actual fundamentals. I think that's the end goal. That's where we will end up and virtual worlds are a really important part of this because what they are is they actually are the potential platforms that they underneath. They're the framework that you could build all these things on because it would be fantastic to be able to actually hop from a social environment to a massively multiplied game, all have one platform, all download the content as it goes. And it effectively has something on the environment where every door or gate goes to what you want basically. I had a program on Windows back in Windows ME days. It was just called rooms and it did a wonderful job of looking like a second life with objects that link to anything in my system or any application. So I had a library with bookshelves linked into each PDF and everything. Of course the moment I wanted it on a second life it crashed the engine that was running the desktop. So it goes to, did you have anything on that by the way I think? I'll just make it quick. As long as there's a capitalistic market involved and there's money, everyone is going to try to do their own thing to make it not open source. So try to push for more open source platforms on your own in your own way whether it be the social side of it, the actual program side of it. Just work to make it more open and slowly everyone else will follow. I think that really is an answer here because it's something we know very well and open soon is that if it's open source, the potential behind large is open. You're not up against too many proprietary systems or anything like that. I'm not saying when you were talking, I suddenly have visions of these new, somebody this week has got a working quantum computer running or something. Maybe at 15 years time, quantum computers have run all this and you're better actually have a viewer that will understand what platform it's going to before you even think it. We'll need good bandwidth too, of course, but we never really know what the future holds. They haven't prompted me yet but I know they will if I don't get off. Right. Oh, something was another Skype buzzing on my watch. Okay. Well, I think that's been great. I just wanted to do a quick check out there in the audience. If we head over to... If we head over to, what's it? Explore 3. How many of you will want to come over and ask us questions? Just a yes from the audience very quickly because we may do that if enough, if you want us to. If I don't see anything in chat, we won't. Meanwhile, I'd like to thank Blair McKinsey. Thank you, Blair. We're welcome. It's good to be here. Thank you, Ghost of Smith. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you, Adam Frisbee. You're more welcome. Thank you for reminding me. Okay, and somebody else can stop me. Right, so I think we're off.


It's my privilege to kick off the Ospo-Con track. Hanna Jimenez is here. Hanna is our fearless leader on the Ospo-Con tracks as well as just really getting all of us together from the Ospo perspective. I wanna start off by saying the last four years have been anything but boring. Would you agree? It's been an incredible last four years. Pandemic and then big macroeconomic changes. And I don't think we are the same people that we were in 2018, 19. I know I'm not, I'm forever changed. And Ospo's are forever changed too. We've evolved, we have to evolve. We can't be the same Ospo that we were in 2018 and 19. We're looking at the world differently. We have different challenges today. And so hopefully you will get a chance to see some of the challenges that I see and some of the opportunities I see. I've decided to focus on four of them. And I welcome you all to add new challenges that we should also consider. So my name is Nithya Ruff and I run the open source program office at Amazon, not AWS. We support all of Amazon as a team. We support the AWS part which a lot of you are familiar with because that's what we serve developers and where developers work. But we also support the stores, the devices, organizations like Fire TV and Alexa, et cetera, and Prime and Music. So the entire spectrum of Amazon companies is what we support and very proud to support that. Okay, I want to start off with the history of Ospo's because I think it's important to kind of see where we came from and why Ospo's were created. To me in the 1990s, I started working in open source in 1998 at Silicon Graphics. And so to me in the 1990s, you had the early tech companies and tech providers like IBM and Sun and SGI and HP who started using open source and shipping open source based servers and products. And they used to have something called open source strategy office or the Linux Development Center or open source technology group. So they weren't quite called Ospo's but they did Ospo kind of stuff. They helped navigate open source across the company and teach people how to work with open source and kind of acted as a liaison between company and culture community rather and community and company. And then in the 2000s, building upon the fact that you had a lot of free x86 servers with Linux running around and huge amount of compute capacity, you have companies who are now called hyperscalers, Yahoo, Twitter, Google, Facebook, et cetera. Start building humongous data centers at hyperscale, creating production level data centers to fuel their services. They built it upon the shoulder of a lot of open source. So a lot of open source and infrastructure. So you start seeing them create something called the Ospo. And the Ospo's in those days were responsible for open sourcing some really terrific software like Hadoop and just a lot of Cassandra came out of these companies and GraphQL and React Native from Facebook, et cetera. So there was a lot of good work done by these Ospo's. You see people like Simon Phipps and Denise Cooper and Eileen Evans and others. Part of this vanguard of leaders in open source program offices in those days. Then in 2023 right now, you find that open source program offices are everywhere in every vertical, in public sector, in universities, it's become the norm. It's become a well-established concept. And you have groups like the Ospo Plus Plus and to-do group who really take time to connect all of these Ospo leaders together, help them grow and help them become better Ospo's as a whole and they run teaching sessions, mentoring sessions, et cetera. So it's become a well-established concept now. So what is an Ospo? I keep talking about this four-letter acronym. Ospo, I think most of us know it, but just to ground us, Ospo is designed to be the center of competency for an organization's open source operations and structure. But it really varies. Each Ospo does what their particular organization needs and should. It should really fit into the needs of that particular organization. An Ospo in a university is different than an Ospo in public sector is different than an Ospo for a company like Amazon is different than what it used to be when I was at Comcast which was more of a digital transformation company serving media and entertainment. And you find that open source in academia is really growing and Jacob can attest to and take a lot of pride in the fact that Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon and Cross which is a center of research in open source software at UC Santa Cruz which is now becoming a full-fledged Ospo for UC system in California. This is incredible and they're taking on an RIT, they're taking on the mantle of open science, open data and universities used to be kind of the IP and patent very rigid organizations from an innovation perspective and now they're looking at other ways to innovate and flourish. And you find in public sector also cities like Paris, county, country governments, United Nations organizations like the World Health Organization have Ospos and in fact the European Union recommends Ospos as a new tool for governments. Am I getting this right? Good. And it is becoming, I love this diagram because I think it's creating a common language for us to talk across these different constructs across universities, public sector, academia, foundations, companies and you know who your Ospo Connect is in these organizations and they help you navigate that organization. They help you collaborate across these organizations which I think is a beautiful language that we've created through a common way of looking at Ospos. And when you look at the maturity model of Ospos which comes from the Linux Foundation's deep dive into Ospos, you find that all of us took this journey and sometimes we stop in various stages. I also find that various parts of our company are in various stages of this adoption. And so it's not always even, oh yeah, we climbed the steps and we are now leaders. What I find is we all start with adoption. Sometimes companies don't know that open source is coming in or are oblivious. Sometimes they're very conscious that open source is being consumed and they're consciously consuming it. Once you start understanding that open source is in your company, the next typical step tends to be creating policies on how we use it, how we consume it, what licenses are okay to use, how we'll distribute it, how we will release it. And so legal teams start getting involved. But you need an organization between the legal team which is often one or two people and we don't have enough legal experts actually in open source. And then you have a huge pool of developers, right? So typically what ends up happening is development organizations bottleneck into the legal team in early stages saying, hey, can I use this license? Can I do this? Can I do that? And legal is recreating policy again and again and again and answering the same question again and again. And one of the big reasons OSPOS come into existence is to act as this development advocacy organization so that they can field questions from developers, understand developers' needs, how they're using it in their production and technology and to then translate it into questions that need to go into legal or questions that need to go into public policy or into marketing or into business decisions. So open source program offices really act as a developer advocacy organizations to help developers with policy, process, automation, so playbooks, et cetera. And cultural transformation, as George and I were talking about is really educating all of these other organizations in the company, purchasing, legal, et cetera on how open source norms are and what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And then you find inevitably when you use open source and you have access to source code, you want to modify it, you wanna fix it. And then you want to upstream that fix or you want to contribute back into open source. And that's when engagement starts happening and developers are becoming part of the communities that they're contributing to, that they're using, that they're part of the upstream work in. And that creates a lot of new norms for the company. How should our developers participate in this community? Should we make time for them to do open source and which community should be involved in? And we struggle as companies to justify the amount of time developers need to spend in working with upstream communities. Often the impact is not immediate and it's not in terms of revenue or cost. And so we kind of say, I don't know why so and so should have to spend so much time working in upstream when they can be working with customers or with revenue bearing products and features and functions. So I'll suppose get into the business of advocating again with businesses to say, you do need to invest in upstream. You do need to work with your dependent upstream projects. You do need to invest in developers working and spending time, becoming a part of that community, building trust, fixing things, chopping wood, lifting, bringing water, fetching water, et cetera. And the last stage I would say is typically leadership and some parts of our company are leaders I think because they are not only contributing back and engaging with their upstream communities but they're releasing code and they're releasing original work done in the company because they say we want to make the world a better place and we want to put this back in the world so that others can benefit from the work they're doing. And that is really the objective for a lot of us I suppose is to get there, not just consume but contribute, educate, make cultural change happen, create the connection between community and the company or the organization and really give back and really make the world a better place because we are here. So having said that, what are some of the challenges and opportunities that face us in 2023 and beyond? I want to start with the first one which is developer experience. And the reason I start with this is because Diego and I are both part of a larger developer experience organization at Amazon. And for many, many years when I worked in an OSPO I would think of OSPO as more risk mitigation and that we are all about risk and about education. But it occurred to me that we are also about making it productive and easy for developers to do their best work. And that risk mitigation does not have to come at the cost of toil and time and delay and developers having to stop their flow and filing a ticket to ask a question from a compliance perspective or from a cultural perspective. So we started looking at how do we reduce toil? How do we automate some of the low risk, low judgment items into the system, into tooling, into workflow? So we don't have to have developers stop and file a ticket. Can I consume this or stop and file a ticket? Can I contribute this? Or can I release this code, et cetera? So make it easy for them to do the simple things. And tooling is what a lot of OSPOs do also because there is no bespoke open source tooling today. For every language, for every company's custom workflow you need different tooling. So we end up doing a lot of tooling and a lot of process and mechanisms so that the toil on developers to stop and ask and stop and consume is lowered. Because I mean modern software development is about using open source. It's about engaging, it's about contributing. And if you make each of these steps heavy and toil-laden or difficult or causing delay, you really have a very poor developer experience. The other thing we started working on is empowering developers to more early in the development process, asking questions and having tools such that they can discover the level of risk or the level of issues in open source they face so that they can solve those questions early. They can file a ticket early, consult us early and solve those problems early in the development life cycle rather than wait until a product is released or they're a week away from something. And education and playbooks is something that's so important from a developer perspective as to why we want them to do something when they should come to us, when they should resolve this issue themselves. I think it saves hundreds and hundreds of hours of people's time to wait. And most OSPOs, by the way, are usually small, small groups of people. They're usually, I think the OSPO survey says most are between five and 10 people on average. And we are about 15 of us, but it's still, if you're serving thousands and thousands and thousands of developers in a company, you don't scale. So all of these steps really help us empower developers and to scale compliance and education and process across the company. The self-service piece has become more and more important for us also. And then I think a lot of companies do this at Comcast. When Brittany and I worked together, we had champions and ambassadors across the company because we can't afford to do everything ourselves and we want to elevate the knowledge level in each business unit, in each organization of people who know what open source is and can advocate in their business unit and work to reduce the toil for that business unit. And by the way, they also have really detailed knowledge of how their business uses open source. So they bring that contextual knowledge, high context, high judgment to doing the work. And so we've been really investing in champions and Diego is part of that program and we have, I think about 200 champions now and we hope to get to a thousand so because we have like 90,000 plus developers across the company, so you can't scale with what we have. So those are some of the things I think OSPOs are doing today, not just mitigating risk but balancing risk and developer experience as a whole so that developers can do their best work and have high impact. And security is the other area, I think that we've all been getting involved in.  Exactly, exactly. We've become best friends with security and I think OSPOs have to be the cultural guide to open source. Security is an expert at what they do but navigating open source security is a different game altogether. You have thousands of producers of open source, vulnerabilities are disclosed differently, how you patch it is different and how you navigate and work with this is different. So becoming a best friend to security and working with them and tooling is extremely important. So I think everything from working with your company and educating them on why they need to support upstream projects, why they need to support things like open SSF is advocacy work we do. The second thing is not just screening for license but screening for security, screening for community health and again really bringing that knowledge to the tooling organization and making sure we're screening a broader set of things. And tracking has become such an important element, right? I mean if log4j is used in, I don't know, 10,000, 15,000 places across your company knowing where it's used and how it's used is extremely vital information when you are given that order to patch all of those servers or all of those applications. And it's also important from a Biden directive and from an SPOM perspective, but it's good hygiene to know where you're using your open source dependencies. And then keeping your software updated and fresh and then patched. I think the survey from Synopsys said that a lot of times a patch is available, the vulnerability is known, a patch is available, but the consumer has not bothered patching and that has caused exploits like heart bleed, et cetera. So keeping on top of patching is something that's so important. And then security and OSPO partnership, we in our OSPO have increasingly been working with our security brothers and sisters and making sure that we understand their perspective when we manage tools like GitHub and manage tools across the company, but also provide them with knowledge of how open source works and what to look for and how to engage with communities, et cetera. Who has heard of chat GPT lately? Who hasn't heard of chat GPT lately? So it's, I mean AI has been around for quite a while and machine learning has been around for quite a while, but all of a sudden it's front and center. And it's front and center for us. We get questions on use, can I use it as a service to generate code or do something? Where can I use it? And how do I get the source? What was the model trained on? What's the license for that source? Who owns the copyright for that source? And so we are having to guide developers on safe use and create, our legal team has been working to create a policy around this. When can you use it? When can you not use it? How can you use it? And things of that nature. So OSPO is a smack in the middle of all this because it seems like a logical place to come to. If you're going to this organization for license use, I wanna ask them about data sets. Can I use this public data set? Can I use this model? Can I use this service? And so we've been getting into that. We are also clearly getting into compliance and due diligence, right? What should we look for to allow people to use a data set? What should we look for from model perspective? What's okay, what's not okay? Thankfully we have some really educated legal teams that we are working with who have been helping us do the due diligence, but we need to standardize these processes because the tsunami is coming. The questions are going to escalate and we need to have standard operating procedures in place for all these questions when they come in. And lastly, how should we participate in AI? Should we contribute data sets? Should we contribute models? Should we release them? How, what license should we use? What construct should we use? So all of these questions, they're emerging fast and furiously and OSPO's need to start getting ahead of these considerations. And participation also includes policy, education, participating in policy, because there are a lot of regulations coming at us from Europe, from US, and we need to understand what that means and whether we need to advocate for developers in our organization and developers in open source and make sure that their freedoms are continued. This is one that's been around for a while and will continue and is continuing more and more to me with the macroeconomic climate especially and shifting investment levels in companies. I always think about, am I articulating the value of what we do inside the company? Am I making an impact? Is my team and I making a business impact? Are we helping the company? Are we understanding what the mission and business objective of our organization is? And are we tying our work to that? Because you don't want to become irrelevant, you don't want to become just a cost center and it's easy for OSPO to be looked at as a cost center and the first place to maybe eliminate or change. And so the chaos group does a lot of good work on metrics, but to me it's articulating what business impact are we making by different businesses, how are we helping with cost reduction, toil reduction, time to market, enabling new partnerships in the company, helping teams in the company navigate foundations, become members of different projects. How is it helping our brand from a reputation perspective, from an innovation perspective? So measuring and communicating this regularly is such a critical part of the OSPO job. It's very easy to get buried in the work that we're doing and not to do this. In our case, we have business reviews every quarter, so we constantly work to refine what we are communicating in those business reviews and how we are demonstrating impact in the company. I wanted to kind of end with a little bit about the Amazon OSPO because I said it's important to understand the business context in which you live and what you serve and what are the objectives and outcomes that the company cares about and shape the OSPO and the open source organizations in your company to serve that. So in our case, there really are three reasons why we invest in open source as a company. One is we build on open source extensively. Across the company, we use a ton of open source. I think some of the surveys say companies use between 70 and 90% of their stack is open source. I dare say we are in that average. Whether it's devices or AWS, we absolutely are builders, our developers love open source and build with open source. And customers, especially on the AWS side, want us to be a good platform for open source development and to support open source projects that they love. On the device side, which is consumers, they care less about what we build on, but they care about innovation. They care about great experiences and time to market. So customers do indeed choose open source. And the last piece has become more and more important to us, which is that the digitization of the world depends upon open source and we have to sustain it. We have to make sure that it's healthy and that code is healthy, communities are healthy. And so these are the three pillars that guide us in terms of why we do open source. Just very quickly on the build on open source side, since the early days, open source has been core to what we do and it's how modern development works. So we support our builders, our developers and we support the use of open source across the company. Customers, I talked about the fact that on AWS and the other side, they use open source. And frankly, our partners on the devices side, whether it's a semiconductor partner or an ODM want to collaborate with us and open source is a great way to collaborate across that chain. And the cloud, if it's your computing platform of choice, you want it to be easy to use open source. And the last one, we actually have a new leadership principle called with success and scale comes great responsibility and we want to leave the world a better place. And so we do want to be a good citizen and sustaining open source is critical to us, both selfishly as well as because the world depends upon it. And so we are on a continuous journey to be a good citizen of open source. The to-do group survey, I believe is the 2022 is available and the new one is coming up and Anna will probably share that in her talk. Other resources, there's a deep dive into open source program offices on the Linux Foundation website. And selfishly, I want to plug the book, Open Source Law, Policy and Practice, which Amanda Brock edited and I contributed chapter 19 which is on Ospo's. And I think it's a great reference book. We're doing book signing at 5.30 tonight in the expo hall. And if you want to do more deep diving, there's a security panel later this afternoon in room 211 that will go more into open source security. So if you want a deep dive into that, book signing I talked about and then ask the expert tomorrow if you want to talk more about what we're doing or want to ask me a question, that's a great place to be. And that's the talk. I think we have, how many minutes do we have for questions? Okay, that's what I prepared and I think we should open it up to questions and have a discussion. Yes, I have my good friend Suzanne here who deeply works in that area. So I will call upon her to comment as well. And Suzanne, this is a... So the question was, how are you demonstrating positive brand impact and I guess perception surveys? So we have a marketing team which lives in open source marketing and strategy which lives in the marketing side. So they've been running surveys every year about perception of customers of our work in open source. How important is open source to choosing AWS as a platform? What kinds of things do they want to see us do? And we've been using that as one of our sentiment analysis and brand impact surveys. The Ospo survey, the to-do group survey is a good one because it really shows how developers are perceiving different companies from their open source brand. I look at that and see, are we improving year over year? Are people seeing us more favorably than before? The soft aspects of coming to a conference, people saying, hey, I really like what you guys are doing. You seem to be improving. Clearly articles written about your work is good stuff. But let me ask Suzanne to also comment. Suzanne, by the way, leads open source marketing for VMware and she's been really focused on this area. An NPS survey that is directed to our customers. We also measure perception change in more industry types of surveys and a brand tracker where we ask that specific question. What do you think of VMware as a resource? Is it important to your buying criteria? And then we also benchmark that data in the offensive survey that Nithya mentioned, which is coming from to-do group, which acts a similar version of that question. So we start to triangulate where it lands in customers' eye line, if you will. And while I have observed over the last few years, it started with the sort of, huh, in customers to today where it's like, yeah, I know I expect you to be there, VMware. That is a given. You will be there and you will be a leader. And it's an important part of our overall personality in the market and the open source program office helps to guide a lot of that activity. When I started with the open source program office, I approached it from a perspective, marketing strategy that I call do, be, do, be, do. Which is go do it, go be it. Then go do it and go be it. Go do it and go be it. And after you've done that, then I'll start telling the stories about it. Yes. Because marketing likes to tell the story in advance of the delivery. And I flip that on the top.  And then I'll come back and talk to you in such a closing office about stories to be told. So if you have any other questions, you can find me afterwards. So I'm kind of adding onto that. I'm curious too. So like that's a beautiful story that how you're able to externally share open source and mission and Amazon and this that, you know, that's amazing. Externally, what about internal shareholders, right? There are people that are signing your budget. So how can we share, there's many different ways that we can leverage, product by these metrics to share with our stakeholders. But what is one particular underlying pattern that we could all leverage to kind of make sure like, hey, our office is relevant in some way? That's a really, really good story. And in fact, it's even more important to make sure that not just developers, but middle managers and the executives are seeing that this is very crucial to innovation and, you know, development in the company. One of the constructs we are using is a business review. Every single organization in Amazon goes through a business review every quarter, month, weekly. We are just doing a quarterly review. And the first page is metrics of, because we live in builder experience, we try to aim at how we're reducing toil, how we're reducing delay, how we're reducing paper cuts for our developers, how we are speeding time to innovation. So it's been more making develop experience really good versus revenue or cost, because revenue and cost is so, so darn difficult to connect the dots to, you know, yeah, because of this upstreaming of this batch, you know, this resulted in this. So we are using quarterly business reviews a great deal. The second way is, frankly, there's an internal newsletter that the open source marketing team has developed and it goes out every month. And I know we used to do that at Comcast. That is so important because people need to know what's happening and what kinds of things we are working on. Third, we do launch announcements whenever we do, just like a product team, we do a formal launch announcement when we introduce a new program. So when Diego introduced the champions program, we did a launch announcement and amplified it to all of leadership and, you know, on open source Slack channels, et cetera, so that people know that we are working on their behalf and we are introducing all these different things. I welcome ideas from others in terms of how are you doing business impact communications in your company? How are you making sure you're heard and your value is heard? Yes, that's fantastic. So the point made was how much money we saved on support contracts because, you know, we were able to access source code and fix it ourselves. I think Sheila probably can attest to that. At Comcast as well, we would say, you know, we are saving X amount of dollars by not buying proprietary software instead buying, you know, an open source, commercial open source. And then if you move further from commercial open source to actually supporting open source upstream directly yourself, you're saving, you know, much more money. So that was very tangible from a financial savings perspective and then the ability to kind of patch things yourself and jump in and do things versus wait for a vendor or wait for someone else to fix things is quantifiable. Yes. So you're saying community maintainers, how can they make it easier for companies to engage? Yeah, so the question is, how can upstream maintainers make it easier for us suppose to show engagement or invest in engaging with those upstream projects, right? Did I get that right? Yeah. One of the concerns I hear from a lot of us is it's difficult to upstream a patch because, you know, I have to wait for the upstream team to kind of include it, have to socialize it, have to, the process is much longer, have to build trust and sometimes the patch that I submit doesn't get accepted, I don't get feedback. And I know the burden is put on the maintainer but I think the more frictionless that process can be for companies to contribute or others to contribute to the process that would be better. I think the onus is also on us to engage early and communicate and work with maintainers to make sure that we are, you know, earning a seat at the table to contribute, right? Because you can't just come in and do a fly-by contribution and leave. The other thing I would say is to teach, you know, people from companies who are engaging with your project to become advocates for the project inside the company and support the project through whether it's GitHub sponsors or to ask you, you know, what do you need as a maintainer and what should we do to support you would be really helpful. We are telling our teams who have strong dependencies upon open source projects to please spend the time to do, you know, blocking and tackling for the project and maintenance work, not just, you know, be someone who throws a contribution over the fence but to actually be a part of the maintenance team and support the group and ask them what they need. Because we depend upon it, but we also want to make sure that these projects get what they need and are supported by us. I don't know if I answered your question. Okay, hey, sorry. Yeah, you can zoom in as well. At what point is the company, I don't know if the smallest company you've seen that has an Ospo, and at what point should I start lobbying for an Ospo instead of having to absorb all of this from the DevRel program? I think any size company can have an Ospo. It does not have to be an entire person or a full team. It can be someone whose job it is to coordinate the Ospo. Anna will also add to it. For example, Netflix I think has a volunteer, a set of volunteers across the company. They don't have a formal Ospo, and they kind of collectively work together on Ospo-like functions. It could be someone in a startup whose job it is, whose enthusiastic about open source, whose job it is to advocate and become an expert at it. And I think, frankly, every startup should be thinking about open source hygiene, open source IP, and open source engagement with communities. But Jacob's going to say something, then we're going to go there. We should talk more. Yes. It's very much related and you just have to think of it like you're one main open source product, like popcorn, or a trino, and then you just start clearing a lot of all the other open source projects. And if you know about things like the security, if you're planning, if you're complying, if you're organizing, you don't kind of think you automatically get asked these questions, and I sort of like weigh a multiple hats in that. But it's basically actually happening. We just don't have the official link at all. Yeah. It's just a gradual journey, but the tasks will always be there and once you sell your software, someone is going to go, whereas my dependency lies in compliance and stuff, very quickly, and then you automatically doing all of the work. And because you know from the open source project, you're going to be doing the all of the work. It's just a little bit. And you get out to bring that label into the organization because it widens your scope of responsibility and communicates that to your leaders that well, there's all the legal things that need to be sorted out, trademark stuff and not the legal compliance stuff. So it helps you to potentially get a lot of complainers to help you with that or at least work with the regular steps. One last piece I'll say is at Sandisk when we didn't have an OSPO, I wrote a one page pitch to our SVP of engineering saying why we need an OSPO. So that may be another thing to do and to do your research and say why it would benefit cockroach labs to have an OSPO and how it will help with brand perception but also with developer experience and other aspects here. Yes. Yes. Don't forget about it. Yes. Because we do sales friction, it makes the customer more comfortable. And that is really important. It's money. It's the path to money. Exactly. Exactly. Don't be embarrassed by that. That's right. I think we're running out of time. Sadly, I want to ask a question of all of you. What other topic should be included in things that OSPO should be thinking about in 2023 and beyond? What did I miss? You can shout it out. Yes. Yes, yes. We need to be the conduit into the company for open source foundations, organizations, maintainers, et cetera. And then back out again, right? Be a guide to open source. Yes. I would love... The to-do group has been documenting that religiously and they do, and I will probably share that. Emma, you had a question or comment. So how you're seeing that work, seeing the champions be successful and broadening that. I would connect with Diego Horquera after the call and talk because he's intimately involved in driving the champions program. In fact, yeah, in all of these details. It's not easy. A lot of heavy lifting. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so... But lots of benefits. But there's a lot of benefit. So thank you so much for being here and I hope this was useful. And I welcome other suggestions for topics that we should include in this discussion of what we should be doing in our 2023 and beyond. Thank you.


Personal finance practice problem using Excel. Dabentures that are callable price calculation. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Here we are in our Excel worksheet. If you don't have access to it, that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank sheet. But if you do have access, three tabs down below, example, practice, blank, example, in essence, answer key, let's look at it now. We've got a debenture type of bond. We're gonna be calculating the price on it as per usual. But this time added wrinkle, added problem, added issue, it's callable, it has a callable component to it. What does that mean? That means that the corporation or issuer of the bond, typically a corporation oftentimes has the capacity to call the bond at that amount. What's that going to do to the bond price when we're thinking about the market price or us on the investment side of things? The market price is generally gonna basically be capped at that callable amount because you would assume that we're not gonna be paying more than the callable amount if the bond could be called at that amount, so it's kinda acting as a ceiling. The second tab here, the practice tab, having pre-formatted cells on the right so you can work the practice problem with less Excel formatting. The third tab just has the information on the left. If you only have a blank sheet, you can just lay down your baseline formatting and add the data on the left. I would do that by hitting the triangle, right-clicking the selected area, format the cells. I'll typically be choosing the currency, brackets, and then no dollar sign, no decibel. I'm not gonna hit okay because I already have this. I'm just gonna X out of it. Then add your data on the left, adjusting cells as necessary, such as the percentages, make a skinny C column, and we're good to go. So we got the debentures. We got the face amount, $1,000. We got the coupon rate, which is the 14%, the yield to maturity, or in essence, market rate, the rate that's not on the bond determined by the market for kind of related bonds, we would assume 8%, due in years 15, but it's callable at the 1,000, 4,10, and they are semi-annual bonds. So basically that callable feature, we can think about it as saying, okay, well, that's gonna have an impact when we do a comparison, we're gonna try to compare to relatable bonds and judge what we think the rate would be, but then we got that kind of ceiling that we would expect to be having in terms of we're not gonna be paying more than the callable amount because the corporation can call it back at that amount. So we just do our normal kind of price calculation then, and then apply the ceiling concept. So we're gonna say the price, let's go ahead and make that black and white, home tab, font, group, black and white. We'll do our normal bond calculation, which is gonna be the present value of interest and the present value of the face amount at maturity. At maturity. Let's make this a little bit wider and we've done this before, so I'll do it fairly quickly here. So we're gonna say negative present value shift nine rate that we want, that's gonna be the market rate or the yield to the maturity. That's the yearly yield, however, and this are semi-annual, therefore I'm gonna divide it by two. And then I'm gonna say comma, we got the number of periods, the number of periods is gonna be 15 years, but we need semi-annual periods, six month periods, half year periods. So we're gonna multiply it times two to get to 30, not divide, multiply, just multiply. That would get us to the same spot, times two. And so then comma, the payment amount would be the thousand dollar amount here times the coupon rate, but that's usually expressed in terms of a yearly rate and we're gonna get semi-yearly payments. So we're gonna divide that by two and enter. And then we'll do the present value of the face amount, bringing that back to the current period. Present value shift nine, the rate is gonna be the 8% once again, the yield market rate. We're gonna divide it by two though, because that's a yearly rate. We need the semi-yearly and then comma, the number of periods. We're gonna say it's 15, but once again, we wanna multiply that times two this time to get to 30, half year periods, 36 month periods, 30 semi-annual periods, comma. No payment this time, because we're looking at not an annuity, going to the future value, that being the $1,000. And okay, let's sum it up equals the S to the U to the M. Sum, give me an S, give me a U, give me an M. So, sum sum, let's go. That's not how you spell prime. Anyways, we're gonna make this black. We're gonna do our formatting here. Home tab, font group, blue. If you don't have that blue right there, it's in the more colors. Give me some more, let me see that color wheel. Let me see that color wheel standard. We're gonna go to that one right there, okay. And then we're gonna go to the font group, hit that drop down and put the all borders. Give me the borders on everything. Where do you want the border to go? I want it on everything, all the borders. Everything has a border. So basically then we're gonna cap that price, price, let's call this price before call. And then we're basically gonna cap it, right? Price after call and we're gonna say, well, if that comes out to something over this number, then we're gonna cap it at that number in essence, because the company can call it back there. But if it's under that number, then we'll keep the price what it is. So we can use then kind of a logic function then if this number is greater than this number than that number, right? So we can do something like that. I'm gonna use a logic like this. There might be an easier one to do, but I'm gonna say this equals if brackets, if this number is greater than this number, then that's a comma, then what do you want it to do? Well, then I want you to take the smaller number, but comma, if it's not true, then I want you to take this number, meaning if that's smaller. So I think that'll work for our logic test might not be the cleanest or fastest way to do that, particularly, because if they're close together, we could do a min calculation just so you know, like I could do it this way. I was thinking just for Excel formatting purposes, you could say, well, if that was the price before, and this is the callable number, hold on a second, this was the callable number, and you were using fancy Excel-ness and you wanted it to do automatic calculations, you can put them on a side by side basis, one next to the other or on top, on top below basis, you can do it on a top below basis, and then take the min of those two. So that's an easier function to use. So that's another option that you could opt for. You can opt for that option if you want. So just for Excel formatting purposes, that's why I'm showing you. Font group, brackets, put some underline, put an underline right there. We can say that this one, put here, and then, and so then if this amount, the callable was less than, let's test out our formulae. If this was like 1200, then it would pick out the lesser of here, and I've got to go over. If this was like 16 call option, then it picks this one. It's working as it should, as far as I can tell. Let's put an underline here. Now, if you wanted to add like a text into your thing, you might type out something like this and say, here's my little blurb on Y, and it's all in one cell, you know? So then you can try to expand it to multiple cells. So you might try to like expand it out here, and you could merge the cells, and then you might want to put it up on the top here, and then I'll left align it, and then we'll wrap the text. So that's one way that you can add basically the text to it. I don't always like doing that unless I have to, because now you got that big cell which kind of messes everything up, but we'll put it there for now. So there's our little blurb, if you wanted to say a blurb. The call price will keep the bonds from getting too much over that price. Investors will not generally buy the bonds at the market price when there's a risk they will be called away at the lower price is our explanation for the action taken.


Hi everyone, Joe for JasperJasperCaseBreaks.com coming at you with 2019-2020 Panini Mosaic Basketball Salo Pack Break No. 173, we've done a lot of these. These have helped us a lot, helped us fill up some mixers. We've got 174 coming up a little bit later and the basketball mixer coming up a little bit later, but for now, you can win three spots in this one. Big thanks to all of these folks for getting into the action. Good luck. All teams are in. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. 11 times for each list, so always do the break first. And then we'll re-randomize the names and see who wins those three spots. So good time for Mookie Betz's first homer as a Dodger to tie up the game in the bottom of the nose. And 11 in the final time. After 11, we've got San Antonio Spurs down to the Clippers. Oh, grounds out for the second out. All right, there's the first half right there, Jeffrey, with the Pelicans. And we've got Grizzlies, Tim Tyler. Who knows? Who knows what could happen in the sell-o-pack break. Let's print and rip. All right, Cody Ballinger, you can tie it up with one swing. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, 0-1-1, Giants off by a run, lazy fly ball to left field, game over, Giants win, 5-4. Oh, we've got Will to win, Blake Griffin, that looks like a different parallel, right? We've got Orange in the background there, Green, Spencer, Din Whitty, and Keldon Johnson. Pink Camo, Damien Jones, Ricky Rubio, and PJ Washington. Not bad, Charlotte. Aaron. Okay, now let's grab these names again from Jeremy down to Matthew. And it'll be the top three names after 11, 6-5. Top three after 11. Good luck, 1, 2. And 11 in final time after 11. Big thanks from 4 down to 30. Thank you for getting in. We'll get them next time. And congrats to Sean Roqueo and Jeremy Agno for getting into that Mamba Mixer coming up later tonight. Joe4JasperJasby's casebreaks.com. I'll see you for that one a little bit later. Bye-bye.


What's up everyone's takedown here welcome back to another video today We're going back into puzzles the first puzzle in a long time that we've done This is wave puzzle number seven from puzzle master It is made by you ask a this level nine on the difficulty scale The object is to fit all of these orange pieces into the white square and Fill it, so I am going to tie myself here and just in case I have to speed up or edit out parts of the video You guys will have an accurate time of how long it took me to complete this puzzle Just gonna reset it and we're gonna hit start and Try to solve it. I think they all fit Nicely like this That doesn't fit right there That was a little bit better these two go in Perfects almost like a perfect seam. I know I think with that you ask a Sometimes That's a almost perfect. It's in dead space here. Sometimes there's always a trick to it, so As you can see the last one here won't slide in there Yeah, it's always one those ones go to good. So I think these ones stay together these ones stay together Hmm almost like a perfect scene except missing a little bit on the end a little bit here He's just been a little bit There Already two and a half minutes down Think it's something with it going sideways, but I can't tell right now I'll just keep going to have an edit options for going this way a little sliver here a little sliver here These ones are just odd Soon just has a little end here in this one They thought that was it this these two fit nice together. I Don't know they all fit nice there other than these two just kind of odd Yeah, only one end fits the other end doesn't hmm really at eight and a half minutes here can't I Think I've tried them every way this way. There has to be something putting them this way on it And I think the ones that fit nicest together that's going to be kind of I'd like a solution. So I think these two fit nice they do So I don't know if it's an end or like I don't know how it goes Is this one maybe go See it's nice It just it's out a little See these ones fit nice together too It's kind of like a stair going down too. I didn't notice that earlier There's some is this one fit here That doesn't look right cuz Even that Yep, we got it 12 minutes and 14 seconds to complete this puzzle and there's the solution So that is how you complete the wave puzzle number seven From you ask a you can get this from a puzzle master Very very cool puzzle Really nice design you figure it's gonna all fit this way, but very very interesting. So hope you guys enjoyed Trying to bring puzzles back on the channel. I do have a couple other ones. I have jigsaw 19 and I'm sure this one is olio 10 That we will be doing in the future. Hope you guys enjoyed. I'll see you guys in the next one. Please take care Peace