Well, I'm I'm Chuck Willis and as you can see on my presentation here this talk is called trends and licensing of security tools Sorry, I'm gonna try to keep speaking into the mic if you can't hear me or anything Just you know give me one of these or just say something I want to make sure that you guys can hear what I'm saying and and I also want to hear what you're saying You know this is meant to be an interactive presentation and and in a way. It's good We've got a small crowd here that we can Maybe people will feel more free to talk a little bit about this because I I certainly don't intend to come up here and say that I have all the answers. It's really just more of a kind of my slides are gonna try to Provoke some thoughts from you all and it give kind of what my thoughts on are as far as Where licensing is going and security tools and and what might be some problems with that so Anyway, as I mentioned I'm Chuck Willis These slides are a little updated from what's on your CD. So you can go to my website and download them if you want There's nothing real substantial in the way of changes and just In case you couldn't figure it out from the title So what we're gonna be doing is I I want to discuss the trends as far as the kind of the changes that I've seen in licensing of security tools and and also talked about how that affects the security community and I also want to discuss, you know, how licensing could be improved if necessary I mean, maybe maybe you all think there's not a problem with what's going on and and also it's kind of a Kind of a secondary thing that you I expect that, you know Maybe some of you all will learn something about security tool licenses in that there's a lot of tools that I'm gonna talk about that You think are free open-source tools that that really aren't and Again, this this is meant to be interactive So I'm gonna ask a lot of questions and I hope that you all will we'll have some some thoughts and share share those with us Just a few disclaimers here I am gonna talk about specific tools that have restrictions in their licenses and this is not meant to be like just ragging on these people or you know Trying to talk bad about people But I just think it makes the talk much more interesting if you've got concrete examples to talk about rather than a bunch of abstract stuff And and I do think that the authors of those tools have done a service to the community by releasing them under the license that they're under I mean they could a lot of the tools that I'm gonna mention could easily be you know strictly commercial tools that you have to spend thousands of dollars for so Certainly the authors are to be commended for what they've done and also I wouldn't be talking about the tool If I didn't think it was a useful tool that people people use so I'm not gonna be talking about real obscure stuff I don't think and Finally the licenses may have changed since I put these slides together Licenses change all the time. So this is the just to just claim her there that stuff might have changed since I put this together and the You need to go out and read the license if you're gonna use these tools You know this don't just rely on what I'm gonna tell you Okay, so a little bit about me I I work for a government contractor I don't work for and yeah, the reason I say that is I don't work for a consulting firm or software firm Which is who releases most of the security tools as far as companies and then a lot of security tools are released just by Individuals that do it in their spare time So I think I'm a bit independent in that sense. I'm not a free software zealot I'm not gonna come up here and say that everything should be gpl Because I don't think that's the case and I use commercial software Along with open-source software and all sorts other software and and again. I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice so But I do think I'm a pretty typical security tool user I mean I I use a lot of tools in my work and also at home when I'm messing around with stuff and And I kind of wanted to illustrate this to show that You guys I think our typical security tool users as well But we're different from normal software users, you know I I use both Linux and Windows. I occasionally use other Unix variants, but You can't say that certainly about standard software. Most people just run Windows And and also I'm not a full-time programmer So I don't necessarily have access to all the programming tools visual studio and all that kind of stuff and and also I'm I can I can think around with stuff, but I'm not necessarily someone that wants to spend all day coding But I but I compile tools. That's certainly something that we can all do We can debug compilation issues if you've ever had to port something from Linux to Windows under like the Saigwin APIs or to BSD or something like that I'm I'm sure that's something that's pretty typical for people here and I like to build little tools and scripts to automate things I hate doing busy work, you know So I like to be able to do that kind of stuff and I also I modify tools that if I download a tool from the Internet or from something that someone has posted to a mailing list I'm gonna take it and start tweaking it if it's not doing exactly what I want and I also like to share my tools and modifications with other people. So if I if I do something I think is cool I post it onto a mailing list So anyway, I I wanted to just mention that because again I think this kind of fits everyone that's here, but it's definitely different than normal software users So my motivation here was that I I use a lot of security tools as I mentioned and and I actually read the licenses Which maybe not everybody does but I've actually been quite surprised by some of the stuff I found a lot of tools that I thought were open source really aren't and a lot of tools that Just have some very strange license restrictions that I that kind of surprised me and and over the years I've noticed some trends that you know, it seems like more tools are going to a more restrictive license So I wanted to talk a little bit about that so here's a quick example here and So since posts with two tool, it's a it's a Windows version of a nick to kind of it it's got some other features actually that have built onto a nick to does some recursion and it's also a Connects in with the Google APIs and all that so anyone here use that tool find it useful Yes, no, okay good. Are any of the contributors here? I definitely know they're here at the conference I sat in on sense post top earlier. I don't see any of them in the room here Well, you're lucky. They're not in the room because if you look at the license for wik2 You'll see that it starts off with the the full GPL license and then it adds this extra restriction that Basically, if you find the software useful, you're supposed to buy them a drink So I expect you all to go out and find them after the sessions over and make sure you live up to that Excuse me Wik2 it's a web. It's a web application scanner web server scanner So and just in case anyone was wondering I don't think that's enforceable, but I'm not a lawyer So you'll have to talk to your legal about that Well, it certainly is a violation of the GPL in the sense of Well, it's not a violation of the GPL, but it's not the GPL You can't say that something is GPL and then add extra restrictions onto it I don't think the real the two really match, but if you also if you notice the wording there It says, you know, it's kind of vague in the wording too. So it's to be honest It's probably a joke So I don't think they actually expect anyone to do that But it's just one of those little nuggets that you'll see sometimes in reading licenses So the just a little bit about the scope that the main thing I'm interested in when I'm talking about these licenses is being able to use the tool for what I want to do and Perhaps modify the tool and be able to you know send those modifications to other people So in particular, I'm not trying to take someone else's tool and build my own tool that I want to sell and make a million dollars So for that's much more difficult as far as licensing obviously GPL restricts that in a lot of ways The BSD license or other licenses like that can allow that but that's kind of a different issue for me So that's what we're gonna talk about So let's start off with the trends that I've noticed and there's quite a few of them here But there's two kind of overwhelming ones that we start off with and the the first one is that there's a lot of great open source Tools out there that that are under an OSI certified license. That would be usually the GPL or a BSD license and Y'all can read the list. I'm sure you've heard heard and heard about and use a lot of these tools You know the end map in ethereal and the Metasploit framework is written in pearl almost all tools that are written in pearl are released under pearls license the artistic license, which is Basically, you know, it's an open-source license. Oh, it's high certified So I think these people deserve a lot of credit for what they've done and everyone who's written open-source software contributed to open-source software that They've done a lot of great service for the community here And I just wanted to say this up front to make so that when I start talking about all the other tools later That doesn't sound like you know, everything's a problem. There's certainly a lot of great truly open-source software out there and But I do see that more security tools are strictly commercial and when I say strictly commercial I say that basically if you want to use the tool, you've got to pay money They may have some sort of free version that allows you to download and try it out for 30 days or on a certain number of IP addresses Or something but for the most part it's a it's a commercial tool and and unfortunately those commercial tools restrict many of the things that security tool security tool users want to do and That's really one of the things we're going to talk about for this session is a lot of those restrictions And so I guess I'll just kind of throw the question out there. Is is there a place for commercial? Security tools you guys think yes. No shake your head Lot of blank stares. Well, I do I don't like I said, I'm not an open Free software zealot. I think that there's a place for commercial security tools Especially when there's not an open-source equivalent if people are willing to pay money for it then then that makes sense, but My other question would be should commercial security tools be licensed differently from other software Yes or no Again more blank stares and I think definitely yes I think commercial commercial security tool users are much different than others tool users or other software users So I think that the license can allow the kind of things that we want to do and some tools do have pretty Pretty I'd say less restrictive licenses IDA pro for example allows you to reverse engineer it Which is kind of funny because it's a reverse engineering tool but I guess they kind of saw that that was kind of a Something that a lot of commercial software doesn't allow you to do and and also if you look at some of the vulnerability Penetration testing tools like core impact or canvas that those are Commercial software that you have to pay for but they come with all the source code So you can go ahead and modify the tool if you want to which is a which is a nice thing And it's certainly something that security tool users want to do and The other kind of overarching theme that I've seen is that a lot of tools are released with what I call a custom license Which is basically Somewhere between commercial and open source so there's a it permits some users without cost usually it means that if it's You know for personal use or for non-commercial use it'll say you can use it But it usually requires either payment or something like that for something else And it restricts some of the other things that we want to do that will get into later And that's really what I'll talk about for the rest of this session is is those restrictions and and tools that have them and And and just as kind of an aside that many of these tools that are kind of somewhere between open source and commercial are released by companies and not individuals and that's because The companies have put money into developing this tool and they want to use it either They're gonna sell it to people or they want people to know that it came from them that they don't want other people Releasing modified versions of the tool and that sort of thing. Yes a bait and lure How do you mean that? Oh, certainly some some tools are like that like they'll have a More restricted version that maybe only works for up to a certain number of IP addresses or whatever And even even if you look at something like Nessus, which I'll get into more a little later Nessus is a great vulnerability scanner But it doesn't necessarily scale real well and one of the things that tenable the company that that is pretty much in Charge of Nessus now that they they have some like web interfaces and other consoles that they'll sell you That allow you to manage Nessus scanners So yeah, certainly it is part of it It's really marketing is what it comes down to a large extent that a lot of these companies the consulting type companies You know they release free tools because they want to draw people to their website and and be able to then sell them Consulting services and software and all that sort of stuff Okay, so now let's get a little bit more into the specifics and and the first one is just basically that that you sometimes you have to pay to use these tools and And usually these are tools like I said that can be used for free in some situations and then in other situations you've got to pay and Sometimes they the license will say that the tool is for like personal use or non-commercial use But there's it doesn't say anything about if you want to use it commercially how to buy it or how much it costs And there's no information on their website or anything and that it's very confusing for users that it kind of To me it's like if you're gonna If you want to charge money or you don't want people to use your software for commercial use You should make it easy for them to stay within the law you should make it easy for them to buy the software if they want to buy it and So that's kind of confusing and also here's some examples of that and you can read through those THC's are you there and is a is a tool that requires? Permission it doesn't you don't have to pay for it but it does require permission and I love payment and permission together because I Kind of think that if you require permission for people to use it for commercial use then you're kind of leading up to maybe you're going to start charging for it later and And it's really comes down to the same the same issues Foundstone's free tools are that way that they their license says it's for personal and non-commercial use But it doesn't say anything about how to purchase it for commercial use the registered plugins for Nessus and also the VRT certified rules for snort are Are that way as well that you you need to register in order to be able to download these both of them We use very similar business models in that day The rules will be about five days out of date If you're going to use the free of cost version And then if you want to pay, you know, I think it's for Nessus. It's like 1200 a year I don't know for snort how much it costs to buy the immediate download so that you know as soon as a new rule comes out You can get it And then another tool is HTTP print, which is just a little neat little web server fingerprinting tool so Anyway, any questions there any other thoughts as far as other tools that are kind of in this vein or People think this is a big problem or not. I don't know Yeah, go ahead Yeah, that just for people who didn't hear that basically the idea I think what you're saying is that Basically violating the license of these tools that if it says it's only for non commercial use and you use it commercially That's the same as you know downloading, you know windows from the internet, you know, I'm bit torn or whatever It's it's piracy and the BSA can come after you for it Exactly and that kind of illustrates why I put this whole thing together is that you know in my job I was downloading a lot of tools and I wanted to make sure that we were following the license I didn't want to get my employer or our customers in trouble. So Yeah, it's definitely one of those things that you need to be paying attention to the licenses of the tools that you're using Okay, another another feature that I've seen in a lot of licenses is that more more than a restricting redistribution and Basically that means that you can only get the tool from the author that you know You can only download the tool from their website, which is fine I guess until the the author disappears, you know, if it's a company and it you know goes bankrupt or if the author Unfortunately dies or decides he doesn't want to deal with it anymore It makes it difficult that you know, maybe a friend of yours has a copy of the tool But then you the license says you can't redistribute it So it's one of those things that it's it's kind of a gray area It'd be it'd be nice if people would put in their license that you know if you're going to restrict redistribution You know allow it if the case of that people can't find it from you anymore And just some examples of those as far as tools that you might have used the system turnals tools are a lot of like little Windows tools that will show your processes that are running in that people use them in incident response net stumbler actually restrict redistribution And then again the found stone tools the and Nessus and start plug-ins So that's the next the next thing that I've seen a lot of is tools that restrict or prohibit modification and reverse engineering and That's really it's it's a problem because this is It prevents us from being able to fix the tool that you know, even especially if the tools like Nessus the Nessus plug-ins restrict modification, but It's it's just a script You know, you've got the source code right there You could easily go in there and fix things if you wanted to but the license doesn't allow you to and Not some other examples of that cane enable and also the found stone tools again and that stumbler This is like you can see mostly an issue with with Windows tools that you know if you don't have the source code It makes it difficult, but some of them like I said Nessus. It is still an issue And that's kind of the next issue is that a lot of tools don't come with the source code so if you don't have the source code it makes it very difficult to make any changes and Well, it's so strictly it's not a license issue in the sense of it's not in the license But usually these tools that don't come with source code also have a license that restrict redistribution or restrict modification So it's pretty much the same issue again, and and without the source code It's it's very difficult to make modifications to the tool and improve the tools try to fix them ourselves You know a lot of times if you're using a tool on a client site and something's being buggy Or you're seeing that the output is weird and you want to be able to try to fix it You know, you can't do that if you don't have the source code and And also the source code is valuable just for learning purposes that if you want to learn how this tool is working and how you know What kind of protocols it's using especially if it's some sort of a like a vulnerability scanner or a pen testing tool You want to know what you know, how is it connecting to the remote system? What exactly responses are we getting back? Maybe try to weed out some false positives and that sort of thing Well, that's that's very difficult if you don't have the source code to know, you know What the thing is is doing and and obviously source code is also necessary if you want to port it to another platform So if you've got a Windows tool that's running, you know standard C++ compiled program and well, you've got a Want to port that over to Linux and that's not really not possible without the source code and Even even in some supposedly portable languages like Java and net there You'll a lot of times run into little issues between platforms that you need the source code in order to kind of convert things Especially if the original programmer didn't consider reporting that you know Maybe they're using some windows specific API's that aren't available in the net framework for for Linux and OS 10 and that sort of thing and Again, this is mostly Windows tools although occasionally you'll see it on other tools I don't use Macs, but probably Mac tools have some of that as well And here's a bunch of examples and some of them Some of them I'm not sure if it was intentional that they didn't include the source code Some of them you may be able to email the author and get it from them But these are just the ones that I saw that weren't you know readily available on their website and some of the new ones here You know Achilles well Achilles is an old tool, but we haven't talked about it yet Brutus Sam spade and Odysseus Achilles and Odysseus our web Proxies and there's actually a couple tools Fortunately only two so far that require credit in the consulting reports So if you use THC a map or THC Hydra as part of a penetration test for other sort of commercial Consulting, you know assessment that you're doing there's actually a clause in the license that you have to give them credit in the consulting report I don't know how many people actually do that or not. I don't know if I'm glad like I said that only a couple tools are doing this so far because if it becomes real common It could be real troublesome to start to remember well which tools that I use in this consulting and you know trying to get all the Credits in there and making sure the customer doesn't get kind of confused as to why you've got all this stuff in your report So is that new to anybody? I mean just do I did anybody use that tool that didn't know about that? No one wants to admit it anyway Okay, well another another issue I've run into is that sometimes tools have a lot of these restrictions in their license But then they kind of will tell you in mailing lists or or other places that well don't worry about it You know we really didn't mean that I guess And that's a little bit confusing So sometimes in these couple examples the website is different from what comes with the tool So you download the tool and inside the tar ball or inside the zip file is a license That's different than what you see on the website when you download the tool One example is you know THC Hydra and a map the license is only slightly different, but there's a little difference in the I think it's actually in the clause that I just showed you that the the credit is different that I think one of the licenses it says you have to include the tool name version and Authors and in the other one it says you only have to include the name and the version or something like that and Another more significant one is a found stone recently released a tool called WS digger. I believe it's a web services scanning tool I'm but don't quote me on that The license on the website is the standard found stone license which we've been talking about which is very restrictive You know personal and non-cursional use only know reverse engineering all that other stuff But when you download the tool inside the tool distribution is the Apache 2.0 license Which is an open source license which allows you to do all those things that we want to do So which license are you supposed to follow? I don't know but from what I've seen on that when they announced the tool that it's meant to be under the Apache license there's just some sort of miscommunication on their website Another example is that Sometimes the author like I said on a mailing list or something will contradict the tools license So when you have a found stones hack me bank and they're hack me books tools Are great great tools to learn about web web applications and do some pen testing against them in a lab environment and all that And but again the license says that they're personal and non-commercial use so I emailed them because I wanted to set it up on our internal network at my company and They said oh, yeah, no problem to use it on an internal lab You know that they they didn't want other people going out and you know teaching classes Which is part of you know how they make money using these tools because they put a lot of work into them But they don't mind you using them, you know at work personally and then that's something will Another issue that I've seen is that you know a lot of times people say personal use or non-commercial use But they don't define that and and different different companies have different definitions I know it's not a security tool, but a Google toolbar It defines personal use as if you download it yourself. It's okay So I can use Google toolbar at work as long as I install it myself But my system administrator can't install it on every single machine I Don't know it's just it's one of those things that it's different companies have different definitions So if you're not defining it, then it's hard to hard to enforce it and then another example is the the ton of the Registered plugins for Nessus. Yes, go ahead right. Yeah, that's a that's a good point for if you guys didn't hear He basically said that if like the found stone tools that they were written by people at found stone But found stone owns the copyright. They're the copyright holder for those tools so they decide the license and The authors of those tools don't necessarily have the authority from their employer to wave that license or change the license So you need to be aware of that As far as who who actually owns the tool and are you actually getting permission from the right people? The registered plugins for Nessus is another tool that's a little strange because the license is very restrictive it doesn't allow you to change the plugins or Reverse engineer the plugins which is a bit a bit strange because there's some problems with their plugins You know, they always have problems with false positives or typos and descriptions of that and nothing bad It's just they've got 6,000 of the things So there's inevitably there's gonna be problems that show up and they've also they frequently have problems with versions of Of services that they're scanning that you know that when a new version comes out They're gonna give you back something strange that it's not expecting So anyway, the license prevents you from making those changes yourself or distributing them But on the mailing lists that the owner of tenables, which I think is authorized to make this statement said oh, yeah No problem, you know You can you can make changes to the plugins and you can post it back to the the Nessus mailing list so that other people can see them So that's another one of those things where it's like well, who do you really follow? I mean, I would guess that you know if they've said that publicly and I know people have done that and no one's gotten sued So it's probably okay, but it's just a little confusing for the users that they really should straighten that out and The other really big issue that I've seen is a lot of tools just don't have a license that they are you know You just can't find it and maybe the it's I don't know there maybe you know some of these there that I'm gonna mention maybe the tools and maybe the license in the tool Distribution it's just hard to find I have seen ones where The binary that gets compiled or is distributed doesn't have any license at all associated with it But if you look at like the comments in the source code files, it'll say you know This tool is under the GPL or this tool is under whatever license Which is really not sufficient. You're supposed to include the full GPL in there rather than just saying it's supposed to be Supposed to be under the GPL And then sometimes the tool is just not present at all, you know You just can't find it and and this is also a big problem if you can't figure out who the author was if you know Maybe you've got an email address. It doesn't work anymore or something like that So then it's kind of who knows and then the other thing is that a lot of times there if there is a license It might be there But it's pretty incomplete that it just basically says something real simple like oh use it for whatever you want or Something like that. Well, that isn't really a full license in the sense of it Doesn't talk about all the different things that we want to be able to do with tools and give us permission for it Again, I'm not a lawyer But my understanding of copyright law is that pretty much if the license doesn't say you can do it Then you're not supposed to do it and a lot of times This is a this is a problem with small Exploits and scripts and stuff that are posted to I call them online forums here just to include everything But mailing lists news groups, you know, if you look at full disclosure or bug track mailing lists hardly any of the exploits that are posted there have any sort of license associated with them and Again, it'd be it'd be nice if if we could say well if you post something in a forum like that and don't include a license It's it was meant to be you know in the public domain or something like that But I don't think that's the way the law works. But again, I'm not a lawyer Here's just some examples here A bind views a new tool. I wasn't able to find a license for it Hobbits original netcat. There was no license associated with that John the Ripper I think what happened was solar designer the guy who wrote the tool Incorporated some other code that he wasn't sure about the license into the tool So that's why there is no license because he he doesn't even know what the license is But he has said that the next version 1.7 is going to be released under the GPL But I have no idea when that's going to happen. I mean 1.6 has been out forever So I don't I don't know when that's going to happen And some other tools that I saw on sequel security comm has a lot of sequel tools that I didn't see any license for And some other ones that we've already talked about So, okay, where are we at in time? Okay, we're we're in good shape So do you guys agree that this exists? You know, I've talked a lot about you know I think more tools are going to this kind of More restrictive licenses. Do you guys agree disagree? What's what's your thoughts? Yeah, go ahead right the comment was a lot of tools seem to be But there it's almost like the bait bait and bait and hook method that someone else mentioned that they have like free tools To kind of hook you in and then they try to get you to to pay for Other tools or a more expanded version or something like that and definitely that's that's been the case in software for a long time But in security tools, it's I think it's more of a recent trend, you know Yes, go ahead Yes, I think that's definitely true Just to repeat for people who may not have heard is that the authors of the tools a lot of times will Will either clarify the license if it's not there or they'll give you the source code That you know usually that if you can get a hold of them They're they're pretty nice about it They like to hear that people are using the tools and definitely that's that's one of my Recommendations that we'll get to later on is you know, yeah work work with those people to see what the what the license is if it's not If it's not clear, but uh, yeah, I agree Yeah, go ahead. I I'm not a lawyer. I don't know I Would say no just off hand that you know again if someone posts something to full disclosure or bug track with no license Attached I'm assuming he means people can use it for something at least but I don't know And that let's actually something we'll get into in a little bit, but what's your thoughts? Yeah, that's that's a good point. Just real quick summary was that you know That there there may be an implied license there that if someone has released a tool where anyone in the world can get to it You know on a mailing list or a website that you could make the argument that they Intended for people to be able to use it for for things again talk to your lawyer And it made it probably depends a lot on what country you're in Again, I'm not a lawyer, but my my understanding is that a License is similar to a contract and just because you and I sign a contract doesn't necessarily mean that everything is enforceable I don't know all the exact caveats, but I know for instance I can't sign a contract saying that I'll be your slave for the rest of my life that that is not a legally enforceable contract, so Anyway Let me move on to another question So and I think we kind of covered this but I'll ask it more specifically is is there a problem with this and we have a Certainly identified a problem of you know if stuff doesn't have a license And it's kind of in limbo that it'd be good to have some clarification there But we're in reference to the other trends that we've seen as far as more more tools requiring payments and Permission for uses and all that is it does that is that a problem for the security? Security community Yes, no Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, that's it. That's a good point and The quickly a summary of it was that yeah That some some tools out there even security tools that are restricting reverse engineering and crypt analysis of them That really causes a problem for us that want to be able to evaluate these tools and decide are they good or bad? To deploy into our companies or to recommend to our customers and that sort of thing so that that certainly is a problem Okay, next question was well, what what can we do to improve security tool licensing? I've got my own thoughts that that I'll talk about in a little bit, but I just want to hear what you guys have to say Anyone got any suggestions? Yeah, go ahead Make a new license Yeah, well and and that was that's that's definitely one of my points that I'll talk about later Is that yeah, if you it would be great if people want an open-source product make it an OSI approved license Don't make up your own license because it'll run into a lot of these problems and it makes it confusing for the users that yeah It's hard especially because of the nature of security tool work that we end up using a lot of little tools to do our work and it's very It's a pain to be able to try to keep track of the licenses of all these tools and make sure that we're not You know doing something that we're not supposed to be doing Any other suggestions before mine? Yeah, go ahead Yes, that's that's definitely a good point the point was that if you're buying a security product or even if you're using it for free it But mostly if you're buying it is you know talk to the authors or whoever tried to sell this to you and and tell them You don't like the license tell them that you want a different license Especially for as much money as we pay for a lot of security products that it's amazing that the kind of restrictions That they want to put on what we can do and the fact that people just accept them You know and just kind of treat it like any other piece of software that they're gonna well We just got to live with it. Well, no, you don't have to live with it Especially a lot of these smaller companies are selling these things that you know They want your business and they're willing to make concessions and especially if they Can understand that what they're trying to restrict is really not It's it's it's restricting what we want to do with the tools and and it really comes down to I think don't treat Your users like criminals, you know if you're you're not giving them source code and you're preventing them from Reverse engineering the tool. Well, you're kind of assuming that oh, they want to do something bad to us Well, no, we just want to be able to use the tool is what it comes down to and being able to use it in the most efficient way That we know how Okay, I got ten minutes left Okay, any any other suggestions Okay, I'll run through what I have on here and it's really just kind of my own You know thoughts feel free to disagree or or whatnot Few few issues for tool users Well, obviously read and follow the licenses, you know, you can't just ignore ignore the issue and if you don't like that if you don't like the License don't use the tool or at least go back to the author and say hey Can we get this changed? but don't just ignore it and kind of go on and do whatever you want and I'd also say I I call it legal trickery, but just be don't Use the don't follow the letter of the license while violating the spirit of the license and a lot of that comes down to You know how you define, you know commercial use and that kind of thing, you know, if you don't don't get into that it would be my recommendation and Again work with the right at the tool writers to clarify if there's a problem and and the key there is politely Because tool tool writers have a lot of times, you know, because if they're writing it on their own, you know They're they're not getting paid to do it They have a lot of people emailing them with bugs and stuff like that and you know You don't want to make demands of them, but just talk to them and usually they'll be pretty accommodating and also encourage them to remove the license restrictions, which is a Good for everybody and also if you if you make changes to a tool Whether it be an open-source tool or any other tool, you know share the changes You know allow all of us to work together on these things so that everyone's not out, you know reproducing the same, you know events Okay, well tool writers. Well, you just obviously you need to follow the license for any software that you're incorporating into your tool In particular, you know, if you've got like GPL software or something you can't cut cut and paste that into a commercial product Choose choose a license and include it with every tool That's kind of self-explanatory and and remember, you know if the copyright holder can add another license at any time So just because I release a tool under the GPL today doesn't mean that every version of that tool is always gonna be GPL I can release the next version of it under a completely different license That's that's not a problem because I own I own the work And if your employer holds the copyright then encourage them to use a less restrictive license or just a standard open-source license That that can go a long way to just you're telling your boss, you know Hey, this is what we want to what users are gonna want to be able to do with this tool And we think it'll be helpful in the long run because especially if the company is trying to release the tool as you know Marketing and and being able to draw people to their site. Well more people that use the tool the better it is for them Just a quick a quick note of don't make a don't make a some complicated restrictive license for a pretty simple tool You know if it's if it's a simple tool just release it under, you know BSD license or or GPL or something real simple and and also say say what you mean and mean what you say when you're Licensing the tool. Don't don't do this kind of well the license says you can't do it But then I'm gonna email people and say that they can and And and again if you if you want it to be open-source just use an OSI standard license Don't make up your own and if you're gonna require payments Well, obviously you need to make the cost reasonable or people aren't gonna buy it make it make it easy for the people to Buy the tool that they can find it on your website that you've got a link that people can do it with secure form Put in their credit card information and download the tool You know you're gonna get more people buying it that way than if they've got an email you and try to figure out What's going on and that's pretty much what's there And obviously, you know make sure you tell people, you know what what upgrades are gonna be included what support and all that and And that's just kind of also a disclaimer that you know, that's what users are gonna expect if they're paying for a tool they're gonna expect some upgrades and support and I also consider bundling perhaps the tool with other tools or other authors because Sometimes people will release that you know a little small tool that's kind of useful and I'll say oh, it's you know $5 or something well $5 is nothing as far as payment But it's a huge pain in the butt for people that work at a large company or work in the government Because there's a lot of paperwork that goes into buying tools or buying anything So if if you're gonna make it one of those kind of real cheap tools They may be bundled with some other stuff so that people can buy it more easily And then if you're gonna require payment, you know make sure you define what you mean by you know Non-commercial use or commercial use or whatever and there's all sorts of things to consider You know there's development and testing and internal use and consulting use and educational institutions government entities All this stuff. So you need to make sure you clarify what you mean by all those terms and And again, I recommend you know, don't don't just allow you know redistribution entirely It's nice to you know allow users to email it to their friends or other people They think might be users and you know if and in the case that the Website is gone forever then now that people redistributed it more widely And and again a lot make the source code available regardless of whether it's a commercial product or not You know give give people the users the source code and allow them to make modifications for internal use at least and That's so they can you know fix things Allow users to distribute the modifications to one another that you know if you've got if it's a commercial tool Maybe you should set up an internal type mailing list just for tool users and that they can email stuff to each other And and if you're going to distribute the source code obviously make sure it's complete You've got all the build files and libraries and stuff like that and just give a quick how-to of you know Hey, this is a visual studio project. This is how to compile it and Again make the tool the license clear post it on the website It's a lot of tools that I noticed that you couldn't find figure out what the license was until after you've already downloaded the thing Well, if it's a if it's a several megabyte file, then it's kind of a waste of time to have to download it Just to figure out what the license is and you know if you're if you're going to release in News item or post something on a mailing list about the new tool that's available just include a quick summary of you know It's a GPL or it's you know free for non-criminal use or whatever You know include the copying or license file or something like that in the distribution And in the online help again put a little summary there And if you're going to go to a conference like death counter black cat or whatever, you know tell people when you're presenting and That's important so that people don't get all excited about something and then figure out that it's well it's under some strange license and and just for the record black hat and death counter actually really good about that that I Don't think you're allowed to present tools at these conferences without it being free for at least the conference attendees but not all conferences are like that and That's just kind of just here. I'll go through this real quick is you know make sure that if you're running a conference You make sure that people know what the licenses are at least and and consider making it like like death con and black hat that If you're going to present a tool it has to be free for at least the attendees and Then the the big one that I think that we were talking about earlier is that if the people that run online forums That's mailing lists or news groups or whatever, you know Again, I'm not a lawyer But I would think that you could you know come up with like a default license that you know If stuff is posted to this mailing list without any other license attached It's going to fall under this license and I'd recommend making that you know the BST license or an MIT license It's something that basically says you can use it for whatever you want. Don't sue me if it breaks something and And if people are going to patch or post patches to existing tools Then it probably makes sense to dual dual license those under the forums license and also the existing tools license because If that way if the person who wrote the original tool wants to incorporate that into their tool, then they can do that with no problem And and also you want to decide, you know, are you going to let people post things under some different license? In particular people are making up their own license. It doesn't allow redistribution than mailing lists archives and stuff get screwed up and Just you know make it clear to members when they join the mailing list or on the website or for the web forum or whatever Or in an FAQ that that that's what the license is So that's all I have yes, go ahead Okay, yeah, I understand what you're saying there I guess The his second point was that some tools especially very expensive tools They don't want to post the price on their website because you can't just download it You know, you need to talk to them You need to negotiate a contract which usually support that involves but you know That's for tools that are in the thousands of dollars. I'm thinking about tools that are you know in the you know, tens or hundreds of dollars Well again, it's like you know You got to define what you mean by that and all that but yeah You know, there's a lot of you're especially a lot of the security tools that we use You know little command line things that they shouldn't cost a lot of money And what was your first point you said something about cross posting? Yeah, how do you determine who the original author is? Yeah, that's definitely a problem that if stuff has been posted especially if it's gone through like an anonymous Remailer or something like that or an email account that doesn't work anymore. Yeah Sometimes you can't even figure out who the original author was so I don't know how to fix that But I'm hoping that you know, maybe we can get some forward Some forward thinking into this that in the future this won't be a problem If there is some sort of default license that things will fall under but again, I'm I'm assuming that can be done I'm again. I'm not a lawyer, so Any other comments or questions we got a couple we're done. Okay. Okay. Well, thanks if anyone else has any comments see me


Hello, my name is Eric. We have one or many flowers, plants in our houses or offices. They are the beauty of our lives and they need only some attention. But sometimes, it becomes hard to take care of them. Daily words, children, or while you are abroad. Beautiful flowers may become like this very quickly. And that is why we wanted to create a very simple, small and elegant device that works with battery and standard water bottles. And to take care of our plants while we are busy or abroad. So this is why we created Plant Aqua. It is the easiest way of watering plants. It is very simple and effective device. All you need is four ordinary AA battery and a water bottle. Place batteries, set timer, set amount of water and press start button. That's it. It will supply exact amount of water at exact time you set for more than six months. No cables, no plugs, no risk. It is really simple, safe and very easy to use. One device will take care up to three plants. It has plenty of colors for your like. And this will be a great gift for your parents and friends. Device development has finally come to an end. We are using prototypes at home and office. They are well tested for months. And we are targeting to finish production and start shipment in five or six weeks. But for this, we need your support for molding and production costs. And for some advertisement. If you like the idea, please pledge, share and join our team. Thank you for watching.


Whenever we use figurative language, we're describing one thing by relating it to another thing. The two most common words to describe those two things being compared are vehicles and tenors. The tenor is the thing being described. The vehicle is the figurative language you use to describe it. These terms are taken from the famous rhetorician I.A. Richards, who wrote out the structures of metaphors way back in 1936. The vehicles and tenors may sound confusing, but they're easily understood, especially after seeing a couple examples. Here's one from a famous pop song from the late 90s. I must confess that my loneliness is killing me now. Don't you know I still believe that you will be here and give me a sign. Hit me, baby, one more time. I probably don't need to tell you that Britney Spears isn't asking a literal baby to literally hit her. That'd be a much darker and more confusing song. Instead, she's using figurative language to describe her feelings for her ex. To make sense of these lyrics, we have to match up the vehicles that she uses with the respective tenors. Let's start with the easiest one first. At the end of this quotation, Spears employs a very common metaphor in which the word baby is a vehicle for what she really means, her ex. Earlier, she uses another very common, hyperbolic vehicle, killing me, to describe another tenor, her sadness. Finally, hit me doesn't mean literally attack me. It's another vehicle with yet another recognizable tenor. Contact me. In spite of all this figurative language, we never think that Britney is asking a baby to hit her, because the connection between her vehicles and tenors are well established. We might even call them dead metaphors, because the original, vivid connection between vehicles and tenors has been deadened by repetitive use. So why would you want to use these terms in your literary analyses? Well, breaking down a metaphor into vehicle and tenor can remind us to ask questions about the relationship between the two terms. Here, it's useful to bring in two other terms that are often associated with figurative language, ground and tension. Ground is the thing or things that the vehicle and tenor have in common. In other words, the ground is what enables the metaphor to work, to make sense. In the first example from Spears' song, the ground that unites baby and significant other is the fact that both babies and significant others are precious, beautiful and delightful. The tension are all the things that are dissimilar between the items being compared. In this case, for a variety of reasons, a significant other is quite different than a baby. A good metaphor or simile or synecdoche will balance between ground and tension. Too much ground means that the metaphor or simile won't delight or surprise us. If I say something like, this pen is like a pencil, I'm using way too much ground and not enough tension. That metaphor doesn't throw the element of comparison into sharp relief. The opposite scenario is equally bad. If I say, this pen is like a t-shirt, my audience won't have a clue as to what I mean and the metaphor won't work. Let's move to a more complex example described in Professor Tim Jensen's What Is a Metaphor video. In that lesson, Jensen describes the controlling metaphor of invisibility in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. The title of that novel, as you probably know, is an allusion to H. D. Wells' famous novel of the same name and its subsequent film adaptations, in which a scientist literally turns himself invisible and enlists this power to carry out a series of thefts and murders as he tries to reverse the process. Ellison alludes to that novel at the start of his story, but he's careful to showcase the tension as well as the ground and the metaphor. I am not one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I'm a man of substance, a flesh and bone, fiber and liquid, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus side shows, it is as though I've been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. There are a ton of things that we could do with this passage, with respect to the tension and ground between the vehicle, the invisible man, and the tenor, the narrator. We could ask, for example, why Ellison invokes a pulp Hollywood story to ground how people view the narrator. At the same time, we could ask how he sets that metaphor in tension with how he presents himself. We could also ask how the narrator's race operates here, how the visible presence of his black skin renders him an invisible body without a head to the white people around him. Finally, we could ask what the narrator means by seeing me. Does he mean that verb literally, as in seeing the body of a person? Or does he mean that figuratively, as in seeing the person who inhabits that body? There is obviously a lot of tension as well as ground here, which is what makes Ellison's metaphor different than the dead metaphor is described in the song. But this isn't to say that pop songs can't also be complex. Let me leave you with one final example, a pop song that moves beyond the dead metaphor. In her 2008 hit song, All the Single Ladies, Beyonce Knowles sings about her alter ego, Sasha Fierce, meeting an ex at a club. The chorus goes, The two vehicles here are it and put a ring on it, but figuring out what they might mean takes a bit of work on our part, which is one of the reasons why the song is so terrific. Clearly you put rings on fingers, so it, the vehicle, can in one sense be understood literally as Sasha Fierce's finger. Putting a ring on someone's finger is associated with marriage, so Sasha Fierce standing in for All the Single Ladies is metonymically taunting her ex for not proposing to her when he had the chance. But that same vehicle, it, is doing something else in the first part of the line. Sasha probably isn't saying that her ex loves her ring finger. She also isn't necessarily talking about herself here, she probably wouldn't call herself it. Figuring out what this tenor might mean and the tension it produces between the first hit and the second hit will help you to distinguish between good figurative language and great figurative language.


Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Hi, and welcome to SiliconANGO Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show. They have twice a year. John, pleasure to be with you again. You and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston a year ago, a little bit further a trip for me, but with views like this, I'm not complaining. Hey, it's a great time to be in Vancouver, a little bit overcast, but the convention center is beautiful, and the people seem pretty excited as well. Yeah, so if you see behind us, there's the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question, of course.  What are you doing? And when I walk through the various shows I'm doing, when it comes to this one, they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there? Isn't that been replaced by everything else? Yeah, I got the same thing. There seems to be kind of almost an anti-religious thing here in the industry, maybe more emotional, perhaps, than other projects, because although, frankly, look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we've got a lot of customers here. That's really the key here, is that are people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward? Yeah, absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles, containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over this piece of the infrastructure stack. The KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think, have surpassed this in size. But as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things, and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of open source. What's not a thing is there's lots of things, you take the pieces you need, and you figure out how to put them together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, says somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by the way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that. Look, I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated. And so that was a practical message here. It's a little bit of a church of open source as well, so the open message was very well received, and these are the people who are working on it, of course. But yeah, the fact that last year, I thought at Boston, there was a lot of almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem. I think now in this year in 2018, I think it's a lot more clear and open stack as a project, or a set of projects, which traditionally, the hit on it was very insular and inward-facing, has at least, is trying to become outward-facing. And again, that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well do they integrate with other open source projects? I mean, John, you and I are both big supporters of the open source movements. Love the community you chose like this, but not exclusively. It's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of open source, they take open source, make it as a service. You were at Red Hat Summit last week. Obviously, huge discussion there about everything, open source, everything. So a lot going on there. Let me just set for, first of all, the foundation itself in this show. The thing that I liked coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at, is if I go up to the highest level, open stack is not the only thing here. They have a few tracks, they have an edge computing track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident open dev show happening a couple floors above us. And even from what the open stack foundation manages, yes, open stack's the main piece of it in all those underlying projects, but they had Cata containers, which is a, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zool, talking about CICD. So there are things that will work with open stack, but not exclusively for open stack, might not even come from open stack. So those are things that we're seeing. You know, for example, I was at the beam show last week, and there was a software company, N2WS, that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start. And you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in like the Amazon environment, and then make their way to the on-premises world. So we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler. Remember when cloud was the swipe the credit card, and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent in the public cloud than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see. With the Zool, it'll be very interesting. One of the hits, again, on open stack has been a reinvention of the wheel. Like, can you interoperate with other projects rather than doing yourself? It sounds like there's actually some very interesting aspects to it as a CICD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible. So it's built using open source components, but other open source components. But you know, what does this give us an advantage for infrastructure people and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CICD way, software on hardware, rather than the ones that have been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't have done it, but you know, we'll see. There's still a lot of projects inside the open source umbrella. Yeah, and you know, last year we talked about it, and once again we'll talk about it here. The ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the kind of big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot. Remember a few years ago, it was HP, 1,000 people, billion dollar investment. IBM has been part of open stack since the very beginning days, but it changes. Even companies like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went out was, oh, we took all the learnings that we did from open stack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we had. Something that I saw, actually, Randy Byas, who we'll have on the show this week, was on the first time we did this show five years ago. Can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show. Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke at some of the sacred cows, and I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that gave us the pet versus cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not zero sum game between open stack and Kubernetes, and containers are great, and isn't that wonderful? If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just go do that stuff, and not worry about this. So it'll be fun to talk to him. The Open Dev Show is being main sponsored by Mirantis, who, last time I was here in Vancouver, was the open stack company, and now, I saw them a year ago, and they were the Kubernetes company and making those changes. So we'll have Boris on and get to find out these companies. There's not a lot of VCs here. The precedent analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time, so this ecosystem has changed a lot, but while attendance is down a little bit from what I've heard from previous years, there's still some good energy people are learning a lot. So Stu, I did want to point out that something I noticed on the stage that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? Open stack, clearly an infrastructure stack. I think we've teased that out over the past couple of years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about the storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of hard infrastructure plumbing that actually everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting. But at the end of the day, I mean, you've got to appeal to the whole crowd here. Yeah, well, one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work. Back when it was, you know, we were talking about getting Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it? Is it fully integrated? And then even further, does it actually work really well? So same stuff that we went through for about a decade in virtualization. We went through this in open stack. We actually set a couple of years ago. Some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic is actually the non-virtualized environments that's the project that they have here. We have a lot of people when we're talking bare metal, we're talking containers. So that has shifted. There's an interesting one in the keynote, is you had, you know, the top level sponsors getting up there. Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications. Red Hat giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit. They've got nice cadence. The last couple of years they've done Red Hat summit and open stack summit back to back so that they can get that flow of information through. Then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, it came out punching. You know, he started with some motherhood and apple pie about how Ubuntu is anywhere, but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper and we're so much easier than the VMWars and Red Hats the world. And there was a little bit of pushback from the community that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold. I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right? And everyone is an open source believer and this kind of invisible hand of capitalism reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having read then left. But so, but at the end of the day, right? We got somebody's got to pay for the baby's new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing at the Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, right? And that's like, that was a logically laid out. Mark's actually, I love Mark's, the Mark's most of his speeches, which was very practical. This, you know, Ubuntu is going to make both the open stack and containers simpler, faster, quicker and cheaper. So it was clearly benefits. And then for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple of crazy eddy slides like limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we put together for you. So that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. Yeah, well, and there are a lot of users here and some of them will hear that and they'll say, yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there, but you can save me money, that's awesome. Let me find out some more about it. All right, so we've got three days of coverage here, here, John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talk about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major release was Queens, and it used to be that was where I would study up and be like, oh, okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, you know, it was the letters of the alphabet, it's like, okay, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features? It's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore. It's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes you have some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployment still probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like. Shuttleworth said, two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put and stand up much faster than that now. Two weeks way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So telecommunications, still a hot topic. Edge is something that, you know, and I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN, changes that are happening, but this is the edge discussion for the telcos and something people are getting their arms around. So. Super interesting to think of the cloud on telephone poles and in branch offices and data centers, in closets basically, or under desks almost. No self-driving cars up on the keynote stage though. No, nothing that flashy this year. No, definitely not too flashy. So the foundation itself, it's interesting. We've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names.  What are you looking for this week? What were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? Well, I want to look at real deployments. I'd like to see how standard we are if we are, if an open stack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing and that if I hire people from outside my company who've worked with open stack, I know that they can work with my open stack. I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it. Whether it does become really invisible and boring but still important or does, do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal? Which as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should be half to worry about all this infrastructure stuff because it's complicated. And so I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. Yeah, and I love one of the things that they started many years ago. They have a super user category where they give an award and I'm excited. We actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today. They won the 2018 Super User Group. It's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs Boson and all those kinds of things but companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer. So you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin who's up on stage talking about the Open Lab, community ecosystem, definitely something that resonates. I know one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is that you've got strong background there. Super impressed by all the community activity. This still feels like a real community. Lots of pictures of people, lots of real exhortations from stage to like we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us. So that's a real sign of also a healthy community dynamic. So John, first of all, want to say happy Victoria Day because we are here in Vancouver and we've got a lot of going on here. It's a beautiful venue. Hope you'll join us for all of the coverage here. And I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen. We are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors. So first of all, the OpenStack Foundation helps get us here and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside. But if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat, as well as Canonical, Contron and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content. So be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minin. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.


Okay, well here we are okay um 12 o'clock rock And we're here doing a show that I have wanted to do for a long time actually the police of Jacobs and and the reason is that she is A common good person trying to help the world trying to help people who might otherwise have a bad time and that's my Understanding of it and she finds Tom deGrasse and Tom deGrasse is of like mind Back even doing it longer. Yeah Trying to make people, you know get through divorce process without injuring themselves and the people around them It's really a simple task, but it has huge effect whether they realize it or not on their lives Now the bar association over my time watching and actually participating in divorce process back in the 70s Felt minted a lot of bad feeling among people lawyers were seen as instruments of of damage You know, I want you to hurt my spouse And of course the lawyer, you know in those days anyway would take that as a cultural point in the practice And you go out of his way to hurt people and then the other lawyer would try to hurt people It was a gladiatorial kind of affair and in the process the the clients were hurt and the judges who They encouraged it honestly a number of them did and so the result was damage and destruction It was really awful to watch it. I couldn't stand it, but you guys came up with another solution to that polo divorce and Mediation Center along the same lines that you've dedicated your your professional time and Thought process and your hearts to it trying to make people do this in civilized ways. Isn't it glorious? You must feel good every day. Oh, yeah, so let's see Lisa is prettier, but Thomas older by far Good, what are you doing Lisa? Okay? Well Jay I have my own firm and it's called better way divorce or also known as pulmonary divorce And so what I do is I help families who are going through that really difficult Emotionally laden process of separating or divorcing and really trying to do it in focused in on problem solving and helping manage their emotions because it is a difficult process and Helping them step-by-step go get through that process particularly if they have children Because it having kids of course makes things more complicated more complex In that the spouses will need to continue to work together as co-parents With their children. So, you know, we find ways to help guide them through so they can still continue to talk with one another respect one another and Really care for their children in the best manner hopefully to reduce the amount of Negative impact that it'll have on the family and on the children, you know But the system this is not intuitively what you would find in the system what you would find in the system You know classically is you represent somebody represent that person's interest you want to win And they want you to be an instrument of you know their their efforts to win and all that and so and you know The system isn't you know, the system is not really built the system classically is not really built around this Right. So how do you make yourself a mediation person a pono person finding the Pono way? How do you do that without crossing any, you know, classical legal conflict lines, right? Well, I mean there has been a shift, you know here in Hawaii. Fortunately, we are in the forefront of Community mediation across the United States Peter Adler. Yeah, we're not alone. It's a big deal all around the country It all around the country and you know since we here in Hawaii have started it Lo-ha and hope on a phone. Oh, so they're so that's a place that does that Yes So so it isn't new but it does take time for the general public to kind of shift their Their mindset from you know, we're gonna slug it out. I'm gonna try to do what I can to you know kind of Get back. Do we have the classical divorce lawyers in town? Yes Yes, there is still instruments. Yeah, so so depending on what the couples process what what they choose to do They could do it the classical slug it out way or they could do it in a gentler way Where we're really trying to focus in on needs and values and interest-based solutions So, you know, I see that there is a movement more towards doing it a more pono way But you know things don't happen overnight and people do have other other choices that they can make But just fortunately because Tom and I and other people are more focused in on mediation and problem-solving and helping them Deal with their emotions in a more in a healthier fashion There are professionals out there. So we're all banding together to let the general public know that there is there are other Choices available to them. It's a movement, isn't it? Yeah It is it is but movements take time. Yeah, okay, so and dedication, of course and talk about time Tom has been doing this since 1932 well before How did you get into this Tom? well If you're involved in the adversarial divorce process, you're gonna have a lot of blood splattered all over you and after a while You get tired of cleaning yourself up And you get you meaning the lawyer. Yes And also you tie it your family gets tired of having a deal with a basket case Right because of the high emotional content That's involved.  Okay? so For a family and so I determined that first of all it's a family that goes through this process Not just the individual that you're counseling all those Relationships and that indeed you haven't in my view in our view You have an ethical obligation that you owe to your client who is not operate operating at a hundred percent. Sure We know that the IQ level and the emotional IQ of individuals going through The divorce process gets lowered significantly So with that on between fight-and-flight exactly just a human condition or freeze which is the other the other aspect Do nothing bury your head in the sand. Okay, so the thought is that you're taking a family husband wife Co-parents children and the extended family and in some facts the community too because there's tribes that develop the husband's tribe and the Wives tribe and then there's all the new marriages that are going to occur the step children and what have you so Complex so you have a in our view the lawyer in that situation has a real ethical obligation to make sure that The clients that he or she is working with are making sound judgment decisions Okay, and so one becomes involved in helping them Transform their lives rather than seeing divorce in the usual cultural context as being a disaster Well, I you know the picture you're painting both of you is that this isn't this isn't really You know applying the law so much as it's a it's a combination of things It's applying the law in a in a pono way in a humane way And it's using psychology. It's using a little cultural knowledge It's it's attitudinal and it's your attitude affecting their attitudes. It's a Social experience Yeah, and we see what we do is a very rich holistic process because we bring in Financial professionals and also mental health professionals to help the couple really just deal with all of the things There's not pure divorce is not purely a legal issue. In fact, it's much more of an emotional Yeah, I think we were talking maybe 90% yeah, right, so if we can help them manage that and get them into a place where they're really, you know Really using their reasoning skills rather than just the knee-jerk emotional reactions. That's what the damages Yeah, you know you we talked about this before when you and I spoke a couple of years ago I guess it was yeah, and one thing I remember is this this use of experts So and you you put them in the same room put them together or do you go one by one? The way I've been doing it is like for an initial meeting. We try to encourage the whole team to all meet together So people can get to know each other the the clients, you know Really get to build trust amongst the various professionals But because it gets to be costly because you know each professional is billing for his or her time We don't always have to meet all together. Yeah, but the concept should be yeah that there's there's a team There's a team definitely and and that is more than just that you get the advice from all these, you know experts It's that it's a recognition a realization That there are all kinds of issues involved here and you can't separate the emotional from the financial You have to address all of this right together and and that you know makes for rationality doesn't it? Yeah, it's it's a matter of helping people move from the Olympic reptilian ancient brain There you go. You said, you know fight freeze, etc To the prefrontal cortex The reasoning But you see this reflected in popular culture now So the image the old image do the one that you were acquainted with when you were doing divorce law in the 70s is the Kramer versus Kramer Okay, oh, I never forget that All out warfare right all out war take no business. Pate remember Pate and then she told me it was the dog And now and now you have people like Angela Jolie talking about a conscious uncoupling Okay, so there is the movement and that's the movement that Lisa was referring to yeah Sometimes it moves at a glacier place, but as we see in the Antarctic now the glaciers are moving a lot faster Everything's faster in the 21st century The other thing Jay to keep in mind is that Collaborative law really is turning especially in the family law area is turning the role of the lawyer on its head Yeah, we get paid now for helping people to reach Common ground to reach an understanding that they can live with that protects the children children of first in my book in our book Okay, that's number one and I'll mantra throughout the process is remember the children Remember the children and remember the children because the first thing that flies out the window As much as parents will say the children because they become instruments.  It's just a human response. Okay, so but the lawyers now get paid to To bring people together rather than to keep them apart. How do you we get fired? We get fired if anybody votes for the courtroom. We're fired That's in the contract, right? Yeah, so we put our money where our mouth is that you know We're in it too that we want everybody to arrive it in a mutual mutually acceptable and sustainable agreement But you can't throw them in a room You know, I remember I think I told you back when I had a client who said I am going to My wife and me you are going to get to Boris But we have to work out the property and we have a friend and he's a business partner We both know him for many years and the three of us are going to get in a room with him Right, and we're going to write it on a yellow pad the private judge, right? The private judge And we trust them. Yeah, that's simple and when we're finished, you know we'll give you the yellow paper if I tell and you'll write it up in a property settlement agreement and You know, you can say you represent one side of the other which I thought I had to do I'd like to ask you about that And which will make it fair. Okay? Okay, that worked out and we had a very nice sociable experience, but You know, can you throw them in a room? Can you find this fair-minded person in the middle? Are you the fair-minded person? And if you are the fair-minded person, who do you represent exactly don't don't you have to represent one side or the other? It's a cliffhanger. Okay, and I really would like to hear how you handle that Professionally personally sociologically. Don't answer because I'm going to take a short break. Okay We're gonna give you time to think tick tick tick. We'll be right back after this break Aloha, my name is Richard Emory host of condo insider More than a third of Hawaii's population live in some form of association But our show is all about educating board members and owners about their responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great Association you can watch me live on Thursdays 3 p.m. To 4 p.m. Each week Aloha Aloha, Kako. I'm Marcia joiner inviting you to navigate the journey with us We are here every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. And we Really want you to be with us where we look at the options and choices of end-of-life care Aloha We're live and we're coming back on that cliffhanger Exactly what role do you play and you were talking during the break about mediation versus counsel? Tell me about that. Yeah, well, you know, I I am both Mediator and a collaborative divorce attorney, so But I can't play two roles at the same time for you know a family situation So when somebody comes and sees me and is requesting services of mine I explained the different ways I can help them and I even explain The process of litigation and I don't do that. So I say that if you want to Leave that option open or if you want to litigate them that there's that's something I can't do and then I give You don't do that. I don't do litigation at all and and that because I want to be clear that What I do for people is to help people arrive I support them in a at arriving at agreements without Slugging it out. It's not just your preference. It's a practical thing You really don't want to do litigation because that confuses you and it confuses the way the system sees you Yeah, and it's also just really for me personally I wouldn't choose to do that because it's so stressful and it just goes against my personal values of the way I feel I add value to Clients is help them talk and help them resolve conflict in a more peaceful manner. Oh, you can say that but in fact No, but that's going to spend your time on the planet You want to spend it in a in a nice way helping people not hurting people, right? I'm not asking too much, right, right, right, right? So so they select their process and you know right now Tom and I are working to go We're both experienced mediators. We're working to grow the collaborative divorce movement And so it's it's a little bit different in that Tom and I are lawyers so Each party has their own independent counsel that they can talk one-on-one with and find out what their legal rights and obligations are But we do work as a team a team with other collaborative lawyers and other professionals that work So I come to you when I say Lisa I need your help and you say well, I got this Chinese menu here Call me you want me to be your lawyer you want me to be a meter as I want you to be my mediator, right? Yes, and then you say well You know you also need to have a lawyer a reasonable lawyer and I will help you connect Is this what happens and I help you connect with somebody who can act as your individual counsel Is that what happened? Correct, right? So if if the person who contacts me and his or her spouse want to hire me as a mediator I make it clear what my role is and that if the mediation were to not work out Then I can't turn around and become somebody's lawyer because I my job is the mediators to help both of them and remain impartial and neutral In mediation we all mediators will always encourage Parties before they sign an agreement. You know, they really ought to have a consultant lawyer Take take a look at the agreement hopefully not shredded apart because all the effort that the mediators and the parties So you might refer me to Tom As correct my personal counsel look at the mediation agreement give me advice about that Right for a limited time. So maybe not part of the entire process a project Is it look at this one document and advise me about that? Is that what it is? Right, right? So it could be more for a limited scope or a limited purpose. Yeah, okay? So now now we're in mediation. Okay, we're in the mediation husband and wife are here together with you Do they both have individual counsel and you know in that crucible if they choose to Yeah, so I've done mediations where either one or both of them have attorneys that it will attend with them to the mediation sessions So you might you might recommend that I hire Tom Right if they specifically ask for a referral for a consulting attorney and Tom as a mediator might recommend that I hire you In a role as counsel, right? So it's just a different wearing a different hat but participating in the process And you have to be very clear about the hat. Yeah. Yeah Huge ethical implications as to what hats you're wearing and making sure that the For instance, if it's mediation, it's not my client. Okay, if I'm acting as a media It's a mediation participant If I'm acting as a collaborative lawyer, then it's my client And my first obligation is to make sure they understand absolutely the key here is education Not only in terms of the process that you're choosing which is very important to be clear Is it adversarial is it mediation or is it in the middle of that pendulum swing? Which is collaborative law because there are cases although mediation in my mind is the ideal way to go Okay, it doesn't always fit the situation. You have imbalances in bargaining ability You have imbalances in financial ability who controls the purse strings and the family etc So a lot of times and it's often the woman that's on the lowest spectrum there Okay, and if you can't if you're unable as a mediator as a neutral as a peacemaker to balance Okay, that imbalance then mediation is not the proper fit Collaborative law however is right in the middle there because you have your lawyer You have that assurance that that lawyer is there looking out for your interest But at the same time you bring a mediator sensibility To all of this a peacemaker sensibility I should say that this should be settled in a way that's the least harmful Particularly to the children and because you have the number of people involved including the experts You can say that the dollar per hour of process is going to be multiples and Theoretically expensive at the end of the day. It's not more expensive. It's way cheaper than having a fight Isn't it fights are expensive? Yeah fights get to be very very expensive. So yeah, even if they have a full team typically they will Save dollars and then you know the value of what they're spending of again is much more They're getting so much more value. You're getting karma. Yeah karma is everything. Yeah Karma is how you spend your time on the planet And there's another way of looking at it and I sometimes explain this too, which is that you know when you were contemplating marriage Assuming that you could afford it. Okay, you spared no expense You got the best wedding dress you catered the best affair you could you invited all your friends and your relatives The best champagne All the planning that went into that Now you're in another life transition here and although it's totally different on the emotional side You should put that kind of investment into it because you're looking at the future of your children You're going to be co-parents forever And if you can have a if you could come out of this so you're not hating each other And respect what you accomplished as parents and when you were married Then you've learned something and you bring that to the next relationship things are going to be a lot better and your co-parent think choices are going to be and So much easier and you're not going to go back to court 15 times because you feel you got screwed on the alimony Or you should be getting more child support or whatever it might be Just like you wanted to build a good marriage at the beginning you want to build a good second chapter Next chapter where everybody gets along and you invest for a good return But let me go to the point of what happens When it doesn't go according to plan And then you try to get people to understand how this works and all the benefits of going through a collaborative process But they don't get it and they go back to that reptilian thing Okay How does the lawyer how does the mediator deal with that? Yeah It is a challenge. I mean when um, we were being trained. I remember our trainer saying that uh, Doing collaborative practice is so much harder than litigating because litigating the rules are clear You know, everyone's role everybody being a you know A gladiator for the other party slugging it out to the very end until we settle the day before trial You know, you just kind of know what you're not But but you know that it's it's it's easier to fight than it is to try to Put reason when sometimes things don't really seem to make sense You know when the parties are just kind of all going nuts So it is a challenge. There there have been times where I've said, you know, we've reached an impasse gosh You guys are arguing about like three hours of holiday time and we're going to spend another how much more money on this So I'd say, you know, if we don't if we don't get beyond impasse by the end of this week I'm really going to say we really need to bring in a coach and really just help You guys deal with your emotions because it's it's really not making sense For you guys a coach is a mental health professional that will work with the parties to get them emotionally prepared to move one for both of them Well, they could do one for both of them or they could each have their own coach like a marriage counselor kind of thing Sort of yeah, but they're rather they're going yeah Instead of going through all the past hurts and everything we really try to focus them in on the present day and on the future Um, so yeah, it's getting them focused to really just be prepared to fit to really You guys are so close to the finish line.  There must come times when you can't When they are breaking stride When I know if you get better at it, that'll happen less. But does it ever happen? Well, um Let's see. Have I had it maybe I can be helpful here. Yeah, there's a whole chapter in my book That was published Last year in 2016 called light on peacemaking how to deal with those difficulties that arise and they do arise on a fairly regular basis It's a very very good question One answer is the selection of the clients that you're taking If you have somebody coming in, okay, that is so emotionally strung out Okay, that they're not susceptible to the big thing which is education Reading material there's online places as a there's a there's a website called up to parents Dot org where you can go on for no No charge totally free and it's interactive. It'll take you through the whole process emotionally and otherwise Okay, if you do your homework if you're selecting people, okay Who are open to reason are you going to have emotion the emotions are going to go off It's just an emotional process. There's no escape from that But how you handle it, okay In the end if none of that works if you selected the wrong the wrong person to represent or the wrong process And if you tried your best to educate them my program is called educated divorce and and the program fails I can't educate them Then there's certain things that you can do one of them is the classic walk away. Okay, which is You guys we've given it our best shot I've done everything that I possibly can as a peacemaker here to help you And we there's still in transigence on the part of one of both of you and I understand that and I understand where it's coming from And how that's hooked to your emotions However, there's very little more that I can do. I don't feel good about accepting any further Uh, renumeration from you because uh at this point there's not too much I can do However, I want to let you know that I'm leaving open that door When I walk away from here, what you're going to go back into the legal system You're going to go pay $500 an hour each to fight it out over three three holiday days. Come on now See we get that. Yeah, I mean fortunately the success rate in both mediation and collaborative divorce is is above 90 percent And there's about a 2 percent reconciliation rate So we're we're talking about a small percentage of people who maybe didn't self-select The right process for them But since it's self-selecting because these both of both mediation and collaborative divorce are um Voluntary processes as long as we do proper screening and give good education And they have informed consent about the benefits, but the small risks that we could fall out Most of the time they're successful But you know what the feeling I get actually from the the last time we talked till now is that this is an evolution That this movement is getting more sophisticated People involved are learning more about how to deal with it the people who come into it are they are better to better likely to understand What their obligations are and what the benefits are? So that you know, we have a dynamic going on this is It's this is moving ahead into the community more people are involved It is becoming you know more of a contribution that you guys make To the whole process is civilized civil civilization is civilizing of the process But I want to offer you both the opportunity to talk to the public The public may not know what we're talking about. I hope they pick up some of this anyway But can you tell them what you'd like them to take away from this discussion? There's camera one the red light go for it. Okay. Did you want to go first time? Go ahead? Otherwise you risk a man-a-log We wanted to let the public know that there are different ways that they can work through conflict and uh collaborative law is is one way where You have the independent advice of your own lawyer But you also have a team of of professionals out there to help you including The other party who right now you're presently not in full agreement with The other party can have a collaborative lawyer too and we work as a team and we work together and we really focus in on Helping the two of you problem solve and come up with solutions that are sustainable Collaborative law is it seems to be the most popular in working with family law conflicts or divorces but The possibility of applying it to other types of conflicts is is out there and available I've started doing elder law mediation so You know and there of course when you've got an an aging adult and adults Children siblings who may not be in full agreement about what to do with their aging parents There's a lot of emotions involved. There's money issues. There's caretaking issues So I see collaborative practice also evolving into those types of areas that aren't right. Yeah, the human condition This means Controversies in general. Yes, and can be subject to and improved by collaborative law Would you agree with that tom? You got one minute? Absolutely My message real quick is something I mentioned before Divorce does not have to be a Financial and emotional disaster. Okay, it can be transformative if it's handled well in a conscious manner If you're retaining peacemakers People who want to help you and your family get through a very very difficult time in your life so Finding the right process if you're considering a divorce or legal separation is extremely important and speaking to a professional That can help you Determine which process is appropriate for you is extremely important. You know you guys, you know Think tank is into the common good Our management our staff all the people around law volunteers We're into the common good and you are perfect for us. We love you. We love the contribution And we love you