Welcome coming into our 80s den. Thanks for continuing on this journey with us. Who would have thought we'd get to Episode 5 and yet here we are. I've been pretty confident that we're going to go all the way. All the way to Episode 6. All the way to Episode 100 plus. Yay! Hope you're all having a good week. Hope you jam packed your lockdown week with plenty of... Sunbathing. Films. And sunbathing. And sunbathing. Britain certainly is. Wanted to give a shout out. SFX magazine. Little Flash Gordon spread. Little mention of life after flash. Not so little to be honest. He's pretty impressive. They spoke to Sam, Melody, Richard O'Brien, Mike Hodges, Brian Blessed, Howard Blake. Pick up a copy. If you are not in the UK and can't get to a supermarket, I'll put a link below of where you can buy it. Check it out. What do we have on the show today? It's an exciting one today. If you are into Marvel, comic book, drawing, superheroes, all that amazing imagination, we have an interview with the incredible Alex Ross. We met Alex during life after flash filming and he was a fabulous person. So excited that we have him on the show today. Stay tuned to the end of the show as well because we also have Bob B Cave with another great prop and the winner of last week's competition. So do not be skipping forward. Stay with us. The competition will be announced later, but before, let's get stuck into an interview with Alex Ross. Life after flash, I was lucky enough to interview the fabulous and intimidatingly talented Alex Ross for the documentary and Alex has so kindly joined me today for the web show. Alex, how are you? I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. So you have done some incredible work. I mean, ridiculously incredible work. What are some of your early art inspirations that you had? All the things I was seeing in comic books were on television. So I was looking at Spider-Man on TV when I was a kid and that led to all the other superheroes I would get to see, you know, Superman, Batman, all the superhero groups you can remember and then, of course, eventually Flash Gordon. Now we've mentioned it. Flash Gordon was obviously a huge inspiration and I could have talked to you for hours on the subject. How did the inspiration and what you took from Flash, how was your future art inspired by that? Well, in a really weird way because I saw Sam as kind of like my ultimate male model kind of face type. He had those arched eyebrows and, you know, dramatic, strong features, very strong jawline and I incorporated him into my art as kind of my male avatar. So the characters I was making up personally that were superheroes of all different types, he was the lead character. So, and I made the character Burnett as I was back then. So it was really more like what Sam naturally looked like without the dyed hair in Flash Gordon.  It was informing the way I was drawing faces around the age of 11 because that's 1981 for the year. The film was still in theaters after it came out in Christmas of 1980 and I was drawing everything to look a little bit Sam influenced at that stage of my life. And that would grow and change over time where I would start to slowly break off of that but I was still thinking of him specifically. I wasn't going towards photographs to look at him at that time. I was mostly just going by memory. So it would take another 10 years for me to get in the habit of looking at photo reference as the basis for how I would illustrate things in a more realistic fashion. But in all that time before when I'm just drawing out of my imagination he was there in my mind. And as far as a lot of the professional work I've done I didn't use his face indiscriminately on a lot of other characters. So I made a point of thinking of his face for a couple specific people. They're really odd references. The character in the Kingdom Come series is a kind of vaguely hard to understand who he is character, a man who has dark hair who's wearing a business suit. And if you interpret his Arabic name he's supposed to be the legacy of the classic comics character, Raisha Ghoul. But his name actually means son of the bat. So it's a thing if anybody gets it interpreted then they understand oh that's Batman's grown son in the story. And then it doesn't get very explained. It's just thrown in there. But I was basing the likeness more upon Sam. And when I was doing my first work with Marvel's and Marvel Comics I didn't get a chance to do this but I did sketches before based on Sam's likeness as if he might have been the handsome guy that the villain Dr. Doom was before he had his accident to become covered in a big metal mask.  A lot of things would make an impact in my art in one way or another stealing things like I stole a soldier costume design from Escape from New York and turned it into a whole character that I built up a lot of stuff around when I was a teenager. You know of the films at that time they still have an effect on me like I'll still bring things from the film Tron into design work because it's always interesting to imagine costume elements that are luminous and that film introduced that concept and that's one of those 80s films that still has a strong impact both upon the way I felt at the time I saw it and what I think about today I'm going to collect any toys they make of that film because it still has that sweet spot for me. Did you see the most recent Tron? It has a lot of strengths and it has actually some of the same exact failure points which is that at a certain midpoint of the movie energy sort of just comes to a dead stop in the storyline but I love the film plus also they tried that graphic thing with Jeff Bridges younger face that didn't quite pan out and I wish they had the deep fake technology back then. I saw a video that you had spoken about Justice League being superheros you specifically connected with as well why is that? I mean the most obvious thing is that it was the most in your face if you're growing up in the 70s and 80s you would have only had one superhero group on television and that was the Super Friends and of course that's the Justice League of America in their most kind of limited form but when as a kid like I was you've been watching it for season after season and then they finally did a season where they brought in more of the characters than just the lineup that had you know four or five heroes you suddenly had ten and it had these oddball characters I knew from the comics that are now being seen by a greater number of people like Hawkman, Green Lantern, Flash that was super exciting and that bored into my brain more than say the availability of concepts like the Avengers or the X-Men who just seemed like they were so far away from ever getting that embrace of popular culture because they didn't have the marketing it's not their fault they had great comics but they just weren't being seen by the general public in the same way that DC had gotten that huge step forward I would love to talk to you about your creative process so you get commissioned hired you get a project to work on ask to work on a project what happens then what is the characterization process do you come up with the creative look for it is there input from other people how do you work? the way I approached comics from my youth of looking at the people I admired a lot of the things that were created were projects they themselves had crafted or created so I wanted to be that kind of craftsman who was pitching things who was telling them what story I wanted to create instead of being told what they would manufacture internally so a lot of things I'm most known for are projects that I pitched they just happen to utilize the most well-known properties that we all know so when I did Marvel's or Kingdom Come those were things that you know were utilizing those characters I didn't create but the story lines the presentation was something I had to talk the companies into and that would carry me through the first several years of projects I've worked on and it's only been in the last 20 years I've got a 30-year career in comics now like I've only had the last 20 where I've played around with things that maybe I was talked into myself and just to see how well that would be nothing I've done in the last 20 years competes with stuff I did in my 20s really and that's just the nature of how life goes is that you know you could be I'm officially a has-been at 50 everything I've done for the last 25 years has not competed with stuff I did when I was 25 years old Is that because you felt like you were a bit more adventurous creatively maybe in your early years? There's such a thing as having something to prove you know I was young and trying to do something that would be breaking some kind of ground if not for me then even for the art form it was unique to have painted comics 25-30 years ago it's really not unique now so when I was bringing my form of illustration into more the mainstream of comics it wasn't that it hadn't been published there had been lots of painted comics there just hadn't been as much of an embrace of painted realism with the traditional mainstream superhero content and also somebody that was really into it somebody that wasn't just hired to do a job but was doing something they were passionate for and I certainly had a lot of passion for that I still do thankfully How has the advent of digital technology changed how you work if it has it all? It means that I have to know some of the terms so I can have some of the conversations about saving files and DPI and I have absolutely no understanding and retention of how this stuff really gets done so I've never learned how to use a computer I don't write emails I don't type I do all that through dictation and all the work that gets done with my paintings is scanned by people I work with so that I send the work to them and they scan and then color correct and all the things that I on average the modern artists works with all those tools knows how to tweak things in Photoshop and I just never bothered to do that because I wanted to keep my hands immersed in the tactile reality of paint on paper as much as I can doesn't mean that fixes don't happen digitally they do they just don't become something I lean on whereas contemporary artists are very adept at all these modern tools which I completely respect I just figure I wanted to make it to my grade to learn anything new it was one thing I really was envious when we met you when we found out how little technology you have in your life because I feel like everyone is so bogged down with technology that it kind of takes away from like you say the magic of even someone who writes a letter as opposed to an email and you with painting and with your pen do you feel that are there many artists that still have that kind of user term old school the approach to art or do you find that majority people have gone towards the kind of digital artist approach certainly would be the majority sure but there's plenty of people who do like to work with natural materials and then I believe from the friends I've talked to working digital illustration they still like to get their hands into drawing on paper occasionally and shift back and forth so I see it as something that it's flexible for everybody working in it's just that professionally a lot of people working on stuff like video games I know many people doing that it's just not going to apply to their world as easily as it might in mind and they have to make corrections in their work that's one of the big differences from doing the stuff I do in comics where I have I'm kind of a known quantity and I'm working with people that give me a certain amount of latitude I don't get a ton of fixes on my work whereas if you're working on a video game that has a huge budget and loads of different people collaborating you have to expect revisions and those revisions are most easily done through layers on computer and you don't stop and start a physical painting with that grade of ease what what that might be the answer to my next question but what are your biggest challenges that you face with how you approach your art I in way I've removed a whole lot of them so it can come down to just simple satisfaction of whether or not I like what I've turned out and that everything still is an experiment nothing's 100% going to work out the way I intend I can plan something out with a very tight sketch and then once I'm putting paint on paper even if I did which I rarely do a color sketch beforehand to test out the color scheme I have in mind it's all the way that the paint might soak in I could be fighting the painting there's all different kinds of things where I can put in many hours of time and feel dissatisfied and I've learned to move on very quickly so it doesn't stay with me and kind of bring me down in a way where I don't feel like doing the next thing I always like to attack my problems by trying to go and take on the next challenge out of everything that you have done incredible career thus far what are you most proud of? I mean in the broad sense it's the fact that I did create original works that I was a co-creator of and of those a lot of things I love like I'm most known for Marvels and Kingdom Come the one that's gotten overlooked in my body of work is the one I did right after Kingdom Come called Uncle Sam which was kind of a reflection upon American history and politics and I did a lot of work that had nothing to do with the genre of superheroes in fact it's the only project I've done that's been outside completely of the genre of superheroes and it reflected more of illustration history and I think it actually is kind of a better product and it's also the one that's out of print Two young artists out there that want to be doing what you're doing what would your advice for them be? Well be more open minded than me obviously you can't turn your nose up against working with a computer the way I've gotten away with basically I've been getting away with murder and I'm in a privileged position everybody else has to learn to adapt to where where the work is and what that work will demand you to work with to get paid but you can still enjoy working on paper working with paint if you get to a stage where you can control more the kind of work that you make yourself generally everything is going to get photographed or scanned into a digital file that from that point it becomes the play thing of whoever you're handing it off to and that's all they need is that file so how you got it to that stage that exists in that file doesn't really matter so if you were able to make it through hand-done artwork you know instead of spending all your time on a computer trying to make something look like it was done on paper or with paint on paper you know you can do that for real except again when you're working in a commercial sense where you need to make alterations I get it you're going to probably want to stay completely on a computer but again if you get to the stage where you can be less redirected in the work you turn in where you're less edited then you could probably do what I've done which is embrace the real as I like to think of it you did that amazing Flash Gordon piece which we came to see you when you actually were in the sketch stage of it and you had said at the time that was one of the things that was on your bucket list to do this kind of definitive Flash piece is there any piece or character that you haven't done that is on your next bucket list you know a weird one that I've sketched out before and I haven't produced a painting because I haven't got the direct license approval for it is I figured I'd do a piece of Queen and as you got into involvement with trying to get around licensing approval with Brian may directly no such approval has come through and if I ever do make the painting it'll just be me doing it for the sake of posterity so the sketch is what it is and I figure that they slowed down licensing for a while because of the upcoming movie that we didn't know was likely to happen the way that it did happen and I'm grateful that did happen but maybe I'll never officially make any artwork of Freddie and the band but at least I'm within my rights to create whatever kind of thing satisfies me and I recently got a chance to do a Bowie piece with the estates approval so if only Brian may had enough input into his own band to actually give me direct approval but somehow we can't get past that Marvel's 25th anniversary edition just came out in March your rise of Ultraman cover was just announced out in September is there anything else that people can expect from you well there was a press release also that's come in the last week I think regarding me being the new cover artist and designer of the newest armor for Iron Man so that's a series I'll be on hopefully overlapping with the time I've not been fired yet off of the Captain America book but I'd like to think that I could keep both gigs going simultaneously I've been working on them for months simultaneously but I regularly do covers for Hulk, Captain America and Iron Man and it's only now that people are learning about this new run and the design I did do you tend to just work on one project at one time and blank it out anything else or can you multitask well I plan things in groups of what I've got to get done for the month so whatever number of covers I've got to do I will sketch out all those concepts within 24 hours or so and submit them all to the editor get reactions and then quickly go into my photo research to match my drawings so I'll be likely taking poses and modeling the various things which you've seen around my house I've got all different matter of toys and life size figures, heads, things that I can use as a reference and of course a deep reserve of photos I can look at for different people so I'll assemble all that stuff together and then one by one go through each cover but each cover is taking me on average about two days to execute so each thing is closely buttressed to the next thing that's of a similar well they may all be different subjects but a lot of them fall into certain groupings I was expecting you to say each cover would take about three months given the detail and quality of them all so I'm I bow down to your talent Alex I really do you're incredible so thank you so much for humoring me and being part of this web show it's been absolutely fabulous to talk to you again and I'm so excited that you'll part of life after Flash and of course 40th anniversary of Flash Gordon this year it's all coming back out so thank you so much and I really appreciate you being on the show thank you so much for having me a fabulous conversation with Alex Ross now when we finished the interview we had a little chat casual chat where he started talking about a couple of things that I had stopped recording my camera but recorded his still so I just wanted to finish this interview by saying if anyone's seen Life After Flash hope you have if you haven't you know where to go and see it you'll see a scene where Peter Duncan discovers that he is not in the Flash Gordon poster so here's a little clip from Life After Flash and then here is what Alex had to say about it oh I did the wrong way take it off I'll set it up pull that down nice where are you Peter if you be anywhere you'd be in here with this group right should have been in here right space I think space around here would be good I didn't talk to you about this I don't think but like I had to learn by watching the documentary that Sam's showing it to the other actor in the film the one guy who I didn't illustrate and it's the humiliation of oh where are you like oh you're not in here and that poor guy actually has lines in the film and I didn't bother to draw it because I couldn't foresee that possibly ever happening that so do you know what I didn't think to ask you about that but I remember at the time thinking I wonder if Alex will see this and realize that he didn't put Peter Duncan in it I felt terrible because it would have been so easy to get him in there it would have been I mean heck I'd be willing to you know paint him over and we'd reprint the whole thing just to get this poor guy in the shot but you know I don't see that anybody's going to care for that effort yeah he was fine about it he was fine also after I finished recording Alex's I stopped recording Alex's camera we were still chatting and he mentioned one thing that I wanted to talk about just briefly nice little fun fact keep recording next time I know I'm always going to keep recording he was talking about using Sam's face as inspiration for artwork he also used the face of Davy Jones who is not from Pirates of the Caribbean the lead singer of the monkeys so quite an unusual one I wouldn't have thought like a hybrid of Sam J Jones and and Davy Jones the Jones twins so I just wanted to mention that little fun fact because I'm a massive monkeys fan turns out so with Alex so super cool very good well we should jump over to our partner in crime Bob for a look at what fantastic prop he's got in the B cave I love movie art so much besides posters original art pieces and a few replicas no art gallery would be complete without a few Alex Ross pieces I actually worked with Alex Ross on this piece to create it for my DVD commentary and speaking of DVDs I don't know if you guys have ever seen this one before but this is an original painting that Alex sent me for Christmas one year I think a good trivia question would be where have you ever seen this painting before hey Ashley I'm really excited this week because we figured out a way to feature one of the things in my collection that I truly love and I'm a super huge fan of Alex Ross did this painting a couple years ago for the metal edition DVD release of all the universal famous monsters and of course my personal favorite universal monster happens to be Creature from the Black Lagoon so with that we thought it would be cool to link Alex's artwork up to a couple of artwork pieces that I have here from the creature and also maybe show you my full size creature I think in order to do this properly though we need to go all the way back to when pictures were in black and white so with the movie's oldest Creature from the Black Lagoon nothing has really survived prop wise from the film usually there's been a couple screen used masks or feet that have flown around the internet and it's really hard to authenticate something so old so my Creature replica is a super limited edition a couple years ago huge Creature fan just like me sculpted this amazing full size Creature from the Black Lagoon and offered several up to different collectors at the time they were being sold as completely painted Creatures and were obviously like really expensive finally through a series of events which is not very interesting I was able to get a hold of a raw casting of the Creature from the actual artist and that started a six month journey on assembling and fixing the Creature and patching holes and stuff that goes into actually building one of these things was the first life size prop that I actually was attempting to build the biggest challenge with doing a Creature replica is nobody is sure exactly what color he was the film was done in black and white and most of the vintage photographs are also in black and white so you can only get kind of the tones of him there's Life magazine article at the time and they published several color pictures of the Creature if I remember this correctly and those pictures are all done with super old 50s, 60s film stocks so the colors even there were definitely open to interpretation in making my Creature one of the things I did to make sure he looked just right was I would paint a section of him and then I would take a photograph of it and turn that photograph black and white so then I could tell if the at least the values were correct so my Creature I did something obviously I think is cool I removed the sculpted eyes from the casting and I actually put in taxidermy fish eyes that you can buy for you know like big fish trophies that people hang on their wall or whatever he sits here in this little alcove and the way I set it up which I think is pretty cool we've got a spare bathroom that we've named you know the Creature from the black bathroom and essentially you can go into the bathroom and you close the door when you're done you come out the door opens right to the Creature and it's such a treat because so many people get startled by having the big green guy turn at them when they come out of the bathroom you know along with Alex's amazing piece of art from the Creature from the black lagoon there's just so many artists that have done a version of the Creature he's just so iconic and so I've been chasing artwork around for the Creature forever and I mean you can just bury yourself in it so I've really tried to like the classic pieces that I love thanks everybody for watching that does it for this episode of The Bee Cave we're working on some really cool stuff for future episodes if you have a thing that you want to talk about drop us a line and we'll see if we can get you on the show if you want to share some of your cool stuff take care guys so our competition last week was to win a Blu-ray copy of this which is the fantastically titled Cleaning Up the Town the Ghostbusters documentary which is amazing if you didn't see last week's episode where we interviewed the filmmakers here's a card go and check it out it's interesting to talk to other filmmakers that have been on this journey just to see the similar stories they've had in bringing these films to life so if you haven't seen it check it out but we asked you in order to win a copy signed if you were going to write a ghost related title of the film what would it be? and we had some good ones really good ones the winner was by Andy Buckland and even other people were commenting that they should win Polter Heist it's pretty good bank robbers that get killed midway and I think continue the Heist as ghosts pretty impressive so Andy email info at lifeafterfilms.com and this will be coming your way next week we will have another competition very exciting and if you like horror and sci-fi you might want to tune in next week don't forget to subscribe comment below what you like about the show what you don't hopefully not too much that you don't like what do you want out of the show this is for us everyone as a group we want to make it what people want so I can't wait for next week's show it's going to be Marvel us sorry


Hi Virgo, this is Kelly from House of Virgo. I'm going to do your next 24 hours love reading for Virgo's Sun, Moonrise, and Irvinus. If you are new to my channel, welcome. Please do click the like button on the video, and please do subscribe if you're keen. Okay Virgo, we're going to take a look at the love energy between you and your person. It's two of wands here, past position, page of pentacles, ten of cups, present page of cups, three of pentacles, and nine of pentacles, and going forward while the Knight of Swords judgment. Queen of cups. Okay Virgo. So I am seeing here to start, you could be connecting with Cancer Scorpio Pisces. Okay, male or female. Center of the reading is the three of pentacles, and this is all about teamwork. Okay, current right now. Working together to carve away the excess or whatever the difficulties might be or the carve away things that are not needed to reveal the true core of the beauty aspect of the relationship. What's most important? It kind of feels like this, the quality of the relationship. What is the quality? What are the qualities of the connection that you and a particular person have? What are the good things, right? Past position, you have the two of wands here, so I feel like there was this weighting energy. There was a lot of ideas that this person perhaps had about relationship, commitment. This person was seeking total love and support, contentment, joyfulness, this is all about the love. Okay, and I feel like, but I feel like person was in a very passive position, kind of waiting perhaps to see what you would do. They may have been thinking about traveling plans. There was thoughts about perhaps buying a ticket or buying you a ticket if you're at a distance to come together. Ten of Cups can be about family. So meeting family, reconnecting with family and friends and just having a really wonderful time. But it was very passive. It was more like maybe conversations about things like that happened or ideas or concepts about a relationship or about what could be. Okay, conversation perhaps about a family, engagement, relationship, marriage, children, all of that. But I just kind of feel like with the two of wands it was very stagnant. You know, it was more like talk, let's talk about stuff. Let's talk. Let's come up with some ideas. Yeah, I believe this person places you on, or they did in the past, on a very high like a pedestal, the Page of Pentacles.  Okay, but let's get some clarifying cards to two of wands. I feel like this person was just kind of in a position of always in like a crossroads or decision mode, but not really taking action. All right, please show us the two of wands with this energy here. Yeah, the full decision about whether to take a risk and do something new. This is taking chances, having a new path together, adventures or some type of new beginning. Okay, I feel like your person was at a crossroad about that or about traveling or about, you know, partnering up and it was mostly always, it just felt like it was always maybe in the conception stage, like it was a great fantastic idea and it's something that they wanted, but they just seemed like waiting for the right time. Not, they weren't sure if something was the right time for them. They thought about it and they wanted to take that risk and waiting for the opportunity to take that journey with you. Okay, tell me why the page of Pentacles is here. Wow, the star. This person had a lot of hope. Really great hope. Hope for you.  I feel like that's Aquarian energy. So you may have been connecting with an Aquarius, but kind of feels like this person truly believed.  To them, you brought them a sense of peace. Peace and hope. You gave them fresh hope. You kind of like a miracle. I feel like this person they may have talked about the miracle of a baby, had these ideas, but I feel like this person valued you so much.  And they wanted to create more miracles with you and they had these ideas about that. You know, I feel like this person can communicated with you in the past because they didn't want you to ignore them. They wanted you to see them. The star can be about being in the public eye or just being a light in their eye. And I feel like in the past this person truly truly did want to have this Ten of Cups energy with you in the past. Let's get a clarifying card for the Ten of Cups. Seven of Pentacles with something, again, stagnant energy, just kind of holding them back. I feel like this person spent too much time thinking too much mental energy, not enough action. But I also feel like this person had some kind of like blockages. They were definitely holding off and delaying things. It's interesting because the Seven of Pentacles and the two of Wands are both waiting cards. A lot of waiting, waiting, waiting, this person putting a lot of like not taking action. They may have been waiting for you to take a risk with them, open up your heart or be more open with them. Let me see. I just want to get a clarifying card. Like, why did this person, what was making them wait or hold off or delay? Okay, the death card here. This person had, I don't know if it's a fear as much as this person held back because they didn't want to go forward and have a chance that it not work out or that it come to an end. Let's get a clarifying card for the death card, two of Cups. Yeah, and so for that, they just decided to keep it casual, friendly. There may have been some fear of abandonment or anxiety. If I take a risk here with Virgo, there's a chance that Virgo might just change up on me and say, I'm sorry, I can't do this. I just only want to be friends. There was a fear that if they were romantic. See, I feel like this person felt like waiting and being staying where they are and not really acting on the things that they wanted. If they just stayed stagnant, it was safe. But there was a connection and this connection, your person feels or had felt with you was transformative. That two of Cups energy is like, I've met my other half. I've met my match. There's so much alignment, so much chemistry and there was compatibility. The wheel of the year. This person sitting on the Seven of Pentacles maybe felt like they didn't have enough money. Okay. For some reason, it seemed like their self-worth was related to their money. And I feel like that put a wedge in the wheel, which is always kind of like stopping things from moving forward. Yeah, the hermit, this person was torn in the past between taking a risk and coming out of that over-sinking or just coming out of withdrawal. It's like, I feel like this person, you and them had perhaps a relationship where it was on and off.  So there might have been like it would go on and then it would stop and then it would move forward and then it would stop. Now, the present energy is, I see communication here coming from this person. And I feel like there's a desire to try to create something here with you. The threes are always about like harmony and union. So this could be marriage, but working together as a team, whether it's marriage, an illegal sense, spiritual sense in another realm. Okay, this person is currently single and they're by themselves and they have their bank account is full. So they seem very stable at this time. I don't see anybody else like around them. Okay, maybe they're pet and just all their pentacles. So that nine of pentacles energy is like very self-sufficient. They are in a good financial stable position right now. But this Page of Cups is telling me that there's some lovely they're going to communicate with you. Okay. So it's kind of like sweet It's nothing serious. But the intention is to see if you can both work together to try to create something here and to keep carving and chipping away at the muck. Whenever I look at this card, I always see how they're like taking that statue and creating a work of art, creating a masterpiece, but both of you working together to create a masterpiece. So let's get the Page of Cups. Let's see what the clarifier is for the page. Tell me why this Page of Cups is here. Revergo. Okay, ten of wands. Yeah. This person reaching out to you to put an end to some kind of struggle. Okay, ten of wands. That's a burden, exhaustion, stress. Put an end to any burdens or stress that they may cause to you. Could be an apology for that with the Page of Cups. I feel like this person feels like they brought a lot of stress to you. Place the heavy burden on you and even if there's not an exact word of and I'm sorry or an apology, I feel like this person is coming in with good intention and expressions of emotions. Positive feelings, love may even get a picture of them. So tell me about the three of Pentacles. Okay, yeah, the Tower. Again, could be an ego thing here that's been destroyed. This feels like crown chakra energy.  They know it. Deep down, in fact, they feel like they've always known it, but either they weren't sure of themselves or sure or they felt unsure of you. They definitely knew there was a connection there. Perhaps you guys were just stayed friends, but there was a love connection that was made and this Tower is telling me that there's like a breaking down and a desire to rebuild. Okay. Because before the three of Pentacles, this is two of Pentacles and this is a decision that's being made. This person has been weighing their options prior to reaching out to you and perhaps they've had a lot of options and no one was really comparing to you. They may have had a couple of choices. No one's comparing. It seems like the relationship in you are their choice and Tower energy, whenever that shows up in a reading, there's it's kind of like there were some changes or something that happened in this person's life that were not pleasant. And it left them on their own and by themselves. Perhaps it's just the burden that they've placed on you is too much for them and, you know, the powers that be came in and just said you make in, you place a lot of burdens on on your lover. So I kind of feel there was a lot of a feeling of oppression in this person's heart and a fear of change, which is why they kept this relationship delayed or why they would come to you with these ideas or plans or hopes and wishes and then not see it through. There was a fear. So now this person sitting here at the Nine of Pentacles and they've got all their money and their finances and, you know, their joys, their luxuries and but they're all by themselves. Just when I was saying that the Five of Pentacles, this person feels lost and alone in the band and sure they have some of their money, but there's that poverty mindset because the love is missing. You know, they've struggled. They were in perhaps a financial struggle. Maybe there was ill health or worry, a sense of isolation or like a financial loss. This person's gotten themselves back up to where they need to be. So you will get some communication or a message from them because I feel like they're alone. So going forward, the Knight of Swords, Judgement, the Queen of Cups, somebody's coming in here to omit, not omit, admit some truth to you and future-wise, you know, after these 24 hours going forward, this person is coming in with a fierce assertive drive. They have a lot of things they want to tell you. There's going to be an opening up and I feel like this person is going to just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk and this can be a card of lifestyle change. So there may be some travel involved here. And it's also about mostly whether this is, you know, whether you're dealing with a water sign or not, whoever your person is, this is an energy of someone who is very nurturing, healing and supportive. They open up about their emotions, how they really feel. Okay, they've been sitting with them for a while, but they also view you as being this way. So you guys have some type of camaraderie or something that was discovered between the two of you. That's very fresh and lovely. I don't feel like your person, I don't feel like they've ever forgotten that about you, but tell me more about the Knight of Swords. What's coming forward? Okay, King of Wands, Aries Leo Sagittarius. So not only is this person coming in with a drive to communication, it's also backed up with passion. There's power, this person is coming forward with charm and courage. That's what's driving them. It could be a fire sign. Tell me more about, I'm just gonna, yeah, I would like to know more about this King of Wands, please. Okay, Seven of Swords. This person, you know, they were, they ran away. They're not running away now. Now they're running to you. I just heard that song, Run to You by Brian Adams. I feel like they're gonna come forward telling you about some type of deception or maybe that they were lying to themselves by, you know, not reaching out or not coming forward to tell you the truth. Okay, that they may have been sneaking around, not intentionally trying to hurt you, but just trying to get their own sense of validation. There's also an energy of back here, two swords. They're gonna tell you that they left this situation as a stalemate. They gave you no option or no closure. They just kind of left you hanging. They left you in a position of where you needed to make a decision, but you just didn't, you weren't ready to make a decision because you didn't want to let go and perhaps neither did they. So they just kind of, you know, took their their five swords here and they just ran away or they were dishonest. Okay, and I feel like they're bossing up here, male or female, and coming forward to express to you or admit to you that that's what they did, but also with judgment is to reveal perhaps why they did and all their deeds and things that they've done in the past in their own life. You know, judgment, it could have been something that happened last year, 2020, but this is clarity. This person is coming forward. They're making the will have made that final decision. They're gonna stick with it. There's a wake-up call. I feel Virgo that this person finds their purpose in life and I feel like maybe you gave them some type of purpose or you represented some type of purpose for them, and I feel like you know, they're answering the call here in their life. Let's get a clarifying card. What can you tell us about judgment? Okay. Seven of cups. A lot of sevens, spirituality, inner awareness, mastery, wisdom, insight and success.  They reveal to you why they kept you as an option or made it seem like they had other options. They give you clarity. There's a restored sense here where you get to know now. I mean, I don't feel, I feel like when they come here in the present, it's because of the why, but I feel like going forward, there's, there is a connection that gets made here with this person by way of the page of cups. It's like a start. It's a small seed of love that gets planted, but I feel as going forward in the future some truths begin to come out. But this person, maybe they, you know, they tell you, yeah, they were living in fantasy land, they just weren't really, they weren't sure how you felt about them. They weren't sure how they felt about themselves, or maybe they felt like they couldn't commit because they didn't think anyone would care for them or that they could be good enough, you know, deep psych things, but this is all about the cups and this is all about the emotions. Or they had too many, they thought they had many options or they thought they had time or they thought they could wait. Let's get another clarifying card for, tell us more about the seven of cups. Okay, the hanged man. Yeah, mostly to do about it feeling like a stalemate situation, that they kept you in a stalemate because they just weren't sure. They didn't want to let you go, they'll tell you, but they didn't want to hold, they wanted you to stay in the hopes that until they got clarity or till they were ready to reveal. Okay, but also they'll tell you that in their time away from you, there's been an energy of like, they're gaining a different perspective and I feel like it's a big massive change. There's a spiritual change happening with this person might even be coming to God or learning about spirituality and how healing it can be, you know. They'll tell you that they felt trapped and they were just trying to make the best of it. They'll tell you that there is redemption for leaving you in a stalemate situation.  The failure to launch energy. So the queen of cups is here and like I said, the queen of cups very nurturing and healing and I feel like this person wants to nurture and heal your relationship and express their feelings to you. A high priestess, they want to release their secrets. And this person, they're learning to trust themselves, their intuition and how they feel deep inside their emotions. This person withheld their feelings, their deepest, deepest feelings, you know, what they may have revealed to you might have been tip of the iceberg. But what they're coming to reveal is the deeper things that no one gets to know about. Even if you felt like you knew there's more for them to reveal. And mostly Virgo is that they love you. It's a twin flame thing. That this person, they have a deep, deep love for you. That's what they've kept hidden. They want that partnership with you, that harmony. They appreciate you so much and they want to receive that in return. They understand now what it means about self sacrifice. They want to be loyal and they want to be responsible and accountable for your partnership as well. And they don't want a breakup. This person does not want a divorce. They don't want arguments. They don't want confrontation. They don't want to be with regret or have to live with the fact that they made bad choices. They put you in a position that was hurtful to you because of their bad decisions. And this is a decision to love now. And that deep within their heart, it's always been you. Always been you Virgo. So let's get a couple of angel messages here. Knight of Pentacles. Loyal, dedicated, protective, a bit apprehensive. This is your person planning carefully before they're taking action but then they get going. They're paying attention. This person pays attention to details. They're waiting for the perfect timing. There's a guardian angel or someone who's watching over this relationship. That's a guardian angel up there. This partnership was meant to be through the struggles ups and downs, ins and outs. It was just meant to be King of Swords for some of you. Libre Gemini, Aquarius Energy, impartial, intelligent, respected and a bit stoic. Receiving wise advice, remaining objective and fair minded, public speaking, communicating clearly. This person I feel like they represent all of these kings, whoever your person is. They have the passion and the drive. Okay, and this person is a very intentional leader, very strategic in their speaking and thought but definitely possessed an energy or projected an energy of unemotional, felt safer in unemotional relationships or projected an energy of being unemotionally available. Definitely has emotions but just felt like it was just safer to keep things a bit surface. And what else? Okay, ten of ones, stressed out, seeking balance is going to ask you for help. This person may be having some health issues due to stress and transformation. The tower, a significant life experience that's requiring changes to be made, powerful and often unexpected revelations. This person is, things are being revealed to them and to you about this relationship and you are, we are coming up on the full blood moon and that might be influencing these changes. But this person and you, it will allow both of you to break free from procrastination because I felt there was a lot of passive procrastinating energy and a release of old belief systems for both of you. You know, there's a shift in the belief systems. Okay, so it looks very positive Virgo. I hope that you enjoy this reading and please come back tomorrow. There'll be another 24 hour reading. If you would like a personal reading, there's a link in the description box below. All right, Virgo, love you very much. Take care.


Thanks Christina and welcome everyone thanks for joining in. So I've titled my talk today a little bit differently than what it was on the, on the site when I did the abstract. After a while we, we, we got around to thinking the response to the report seems to be very much so that it's the skills aspect and having having that being good for your career and something that that hiring managers are looking for. And so I decided to tweak the title a little bit so I've called it building open source skills is good for your career, and this is the way, if you're a fan of the Mandalorian you'll understand that. So again I'm Chris Harris I'm an IBM fellow and CTO for open technology. Basically I have overall responsibility for all of the open source and open standards work that we do at IBM. And I have a team that's, you know, very much engaged in open source and I myself and frequently engaged in this project or that. Most recently I was deeply involved in creating that for me the hyper ledger organization and serve as a maintainer word member chair of the TSE and so forth. And, and this past year, we're very closely with some colleagues at Microsoft and GitHub and Google. And we created the open source security foundation open SSF. And so that's where I've been spending most of my time lately. And so, without further ado, this is not working. So, so let's start with, you know, somebody that I worked with way back in the day when I worked at some micro systems. I work with this guy here bill joy. You may know him. He's sort of the inventor of BSD. And he had a saying that no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for somebody else, we call this joys law. And what he's really trying to say here is that, you know, even, you know, a company the size of a Google or an Amazon or Microsoft or an IBM doesn't have all the smart people. They're more smart people that work for the other companies than work for your own. And so when you think about how this impacts innovation. It really means that if you're, if your competitors are collaborating together out in the open, then you had a distinct disadvantage if you're not playing in that same party. And then Eric Raymond back in 1997 had a very present quote from from his paper, the cathedral on the bizarre, perhaps in the end, the open source cultural triumph simply because the close source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem. And this is essentially, this is this is the, the reason I think in many regards as to why open source is succeeding and is really starting into to sort of eat away at the proprietary software era. So why do you know why do people choose open source well you know there's a perception that there's a better there's more of a speed of innovation going on in the various open source communities. So if you're collaborating with even your fiercest competitors in building something like the container orchestration service and in Kubernetes. You're going to be innovating much more quickly than if any one of those companies were to try to do it all on their own. There's a potential cost savings for development so if you're incorporating open source into the applications or solutions that you're building. You're not having to spend time developing that component that you incorporate that is based on open source. You're getting that from the community. And if you're doing it right then you're also helping to contribute back either development documentation bug fixes and testing and so forth.  I'm more interested in solving problems that haven't been solved. So companies that look for interoperability and essentially you can look at open source as sort of the next wave of how we do sort of open standards right you think about the whole purpose of developing open standards is to deliver interoperability and freedom from vendor locking right so you know back in the day I worked with Microsoft on developing some of the XML web services standards. And the whole point there is to drive interoperability between the IBM world and the Microsoft world. And our customers are really, you know, 100% behind that. But now we're seeing, you know, everything's moving to the cloud and, and yet, there is no, you know, there's much more of a sense that people are selecting multiple different clouds for their deployments. And so as a result you're looking for interoperability and portability between different cloud platforms. So what are the benefits to developers well, and this is again this is taken from some some charts that I've presented in the past, but basically open source gives you improved skills. It gives you support, and you can sort of increase your, your technical eminence in those communities through participation in open source. So again it's an accelerant innovation you're not having to reinvent the wheel so to speak. It gives you access to experience technologies so you know one of the things that's really great about open source is that you can be rubbing elbows and working side by side and getting, you know, constructive feedback in code reviews, those experienced technologists on the planet. And they don't have to be working for the same companies you could be working for some small startup, and yet rubbing elbows and getting advice and coaching and mentoring and critical reviews from somebody who's working, and has been working at a company like a Google or, or a Microsoft or an IBM. We're finding that again open source communities are starting to become the sort of interactive hubs for developers it's where they can sort of get together and show off their skills their their subject matter knowledge and so forth. Whether it's in these areas conferences that are held as a result of you know organizing around these communities, or whether it's just in the community development process itself. It helps you build that technical elements amongst your peers and this is important to you know your future job prospects. Why does open source mattered IBM well, you know from our perspective again, it's improved products and offerings it's improved performance of our ability to deliver capability quickly. And it's, and it's a source for skilled resources from skilled developers and advocates and so forth. You know, again being able to deliver trusted scalable secure services is really important. And again, if you start as a family with a foundation of open source such as we have with Kubernetes for instance in our open shift offerings and our IBM cloud. It gives us a head start and then we can focus on not reinventing the same set of wheels that does container orchestration, but focusing on the user experience for instance and making that a little bit simpler for people. It gives us the ability to deliver innovative and highly scalable for front technologies can talk about coob. But it's the same thing for AI and machine learning capabilities. So those that are incorporated into for instance IBM's cloud patch for data are based on open source technologies, or just the open source technologies themselves in many cases. And again it helps our developers maintain and sort of grow in their skill set by contributing out into these open source communities so so we see this as a unique opportunity for IBM. You know, so like I said this I've been saying this now for, I can't remember how long but you know for quite some time when I talked to clients and when I talked to conferences and so forth. But last year, I think, you know, probably in the early fall time period.  And I was really excited that because as a developer. That's not the thing that's necessarily from my perspective that's not necessarily the thing that I need to know if I'm going to get a job because not everybody uses Amazon. It's a very popular cloud platform, but not everybody uses Amazon, and certainly not everybody uses Amazon exclusively. And so it's really motivating developers I thought was no I think it's really the underlying open source that fuels a lot of these cloud platforms that really matters, and not necessarily the vendor specific API that adorn them. And so I got together with some colleagues and IBM's market development insights, and you know we pitched the idea of we should do a study to find out exactly what is it that's motivating developers right developers really think that they should know a proprietary API over the underlying open source APIs. What's important from from their perspective of you know from a career building perspective. What motivates hiring managers into hiring somebody is it their knowledge of the underlying proprietary API is or is it the knowledge of the underlying open source that's really important to to hiring managers and so we put the Riley to develop a survey that went out and we talked to its 33441 respondents there was actually a few more than that, but not all of the responses were complete so we only took all of the complete ones but basically just over 3400 respondents, there was sort of a variety of showing a second, you know sort of the mix of who, who we were talking to. And, you know we asked them a series of questions relating to the topic I just, I just broached. What do we find. The majority think that knowledge of and contribute contributions to open source are much more important to their careers than, and their professional opportunities then are, you know, focusing exclusively on proprietary APIs. So that's, that's sort of the most important thing, I think that, you know, we learned from from this study. I think there's a lot of the, the same things that we just talked about, you know, people are looking to open source software because it gives you certain guarantees, or certain mitigations against vendor lock in. There's lower costs involved because you can actually download your the software for free again doesn't, it's free isn't isn't as in beer there is how you see some support costs and so forth associated with it, operational costs. And also the ability to sort of build on and leverage the ideas and innovation from a large community, right. And so that's really, I think the, the attractiveness of, you know, why, why developers feel that it's important. In terms of the developers considered the skills related to the underlying open sources be more important than the proprietary platforms themselves. And so Linux and Kubernetes are much more beneficial than the proprietary API set the cloud providers offer. I mean, you know, in terms of which of the technologies from an open source perspective are most significant most important to developers and to the hiring managers in terms of experience looking, you know, looking for experience in their in their potential hires. Linux itself was number one. Containers obviously came in a close second databases were perceived as more important and then it sort of trickled down to, you know, various other specific technologies. And again, when we think about, you know, developing from a cloud native perspective and from a data and AI machine learning perspective, you know, these are the things that really are the underlying powerhouses for for that type of development. And basically about 50% of the developers consider that their knowledge and their experience with these technologies had resulted in higher pay. That's really sort of the gist of it. You know, as I mentioned, they want to understand the value open source to developers. When we when we went out there so that was the primary motivation behind the study. I mentioned we have a total of 3441 participants in the study itself. And again, we can identify themselves as software engineers or architects, and you know dev ops and so forth. And then, you know, the others were hiring managers and so forth we have a breadth of coverage from large enterprises from mid market companies and smaller ISVs and smaller companies. And again, the responses were pretty much consistent across all the different dimensions here. I will highlight a couple of important distinctions in terms of the responses when you sort of drill down into the details of the study itself, where we find that some hiring managers are actually more bullish on open source than the developers themselves. So, again, it's a strong signal for, you know, where things are heading. So again, you know we talked about this you know what, what are the benefits of open source over proprietary software and this is pretty stark. You know the differential differentiation here, you know minimizing vendor lock and you know basically 85% of the respondents felt that it was either losing. So, you know, whether it's strongly associated or somewhat associated versus disassociated. So, you know, again, you know, these are, that's a significant data point there. And then, you know, people basically felt that well obviously if you're dealing with vendor specific stuff, you're not necessarily minimizing your vendor lock in. So, you know, perception I think again, this is one of those, this is one of those areas where you know obviously it's it's open source it's free you can download it doesn't cost you a nickel. And you can just deploy it in your enterprise but then there's always the day to operational aspects of things how are you going to patch it how are you going to support it going forward. For free. So there is a certain support costs associated with it but certainly, I think many still perceive that even adding in the sort of the, the day to operational support and and support development cases that it's still lower cost and then then proprietary software offerings. And there's another catch to that I think increasingly people do sort of hit that threshold, where they realize what they really want is they want the open source for the benefits the other benefits that we see here. But they're looking for somebody to help them with the support and services of the technology itself. 76% think it makes me feel like I'm part of a community. And I think that's, even if you're just a user of the software not contributing back and participating actively out in the open source community. There's a certain affiliation with that broader community if you're if you're in the user community and sometimes you end up going to, well maybe not now with the coven, but you know in the past, you know people would show up at conferences that aren't necessarily contributing in the community but they're using the technology and they, they want to learn more they want to sort of elbows with the people that are building it. I think there is a strong sense of community associated with open source, there isn't really with proprietary software. It provides incentive to innovate again you know this is one of those things that I think, you know people underestimate is that, you know because open source, you know gives you the ability to fork it you can, you can you can actually take it and then you can build a derivative of that you can build on the shoulders of giants as I say, and come up with something new and important and improvements in some in some way. It makes my job more meaningful so 66%, almost two thirds say that it makes them feel more meaningful in terms of their job prevents silos again a slightly lesser percentage thinks that it prevents silos again the proprietary software in the red there is still trickling down in the single digits. More support available this is again this is the point that I was making above in that you know again. There is there's an increasing awareness of the fact that you can actually get fairly decent support from the community whether it's the documentation, whether it's you know seeking, you know filing an issue and getting a response and getting a bug fix and so forth. Many of the more vibrant and diverse and and sort of popular communities are very effective at delivering essential support. You know, not necessarily the same that you would expect from a vendor. And certainly the vendor software about 35% there think that it's more strongly associated with, you know, with vendors specific technologies. But again increasingly I think people are looking to vendors providing support for the open source right in the red hat sort of model of providing a subscription to an underlying source software package. More reliable more error, you know, less error prone and so forth I think again increasingly people are looking at open source is providing that you know the, you know the old saying of many eyes makes all bugs shallow it's not totally true it's you know that there are bugs in software. That's the nature of the game, but increasingly, you know, especially as communities focus on things like improving security and improving their, their testing and so forth. You know, generally, people are finding that open source tends to be much more reliable robust than even the preparatory offerings, and then easier to use and I think again this this comes from the perspective that because you can engage with the developer to get feedback into the development cycle. And so ease of use comes out, oftentimes in in dealing with that. Okay. Other key requirements technology flexibility. Right. And again this is where you think about from an open source perspective you actually have access to the software, you know, and so you can maybe configure it to suit your specific needs. You can implement it you can build on top of it. Right so it's much more flexible than proprietary software that you don't have the software, you know you don't have the code for, and you've got to sort of adapt to whatever API is that give you the developer satisfaction again, most developers prefer to work with open source then with proprietary software. Again, speed of development, the quality of the code we talked about that security is another important thing. Although again it's not something that's perfect. You know, but it is something that increasingly more and more people are starting to think very long and hard about securing the open source supply chains, if you will, especially in light of things like the several wins incident. functionality again people think that, you know, from a perspective of providing the functionality that they need, they get better response from open source software. Better performance and stability from open source, and then again we have the support, which works in the other direction. You know when you buy something from a vendor, you know they're signing up to give you full blown support and services around that capability that technology. And so they're on the hook, but I think that trend is moving in the right direction, where more and more, you know, people are looking for support for the open source and not for proprietary derivative of that. Open source skills are more beneficial to people's careers than skills related specific cloud platforms. Again, this is the sort of the crux of what it was that I was hoping to hear. And it, and it sort of paid out, you know, in spades here, 65% think that open source is much more beneficial to their careers than dealing and acquiring skills related to specific platforms, which was 35%. And so this, again, this makes me feel good, because I get to say I told you so, right. But it's, it's actually it's interesting from the perspective that if you're a developer, and you have to sort of make some choices in your life about you know so what am I going to pursue, which skills am I going to acquire to make my job prospects better and so forth. This gives you a pretty clear picture of where you should be focusing. Again, two thirds of developers would prefer to work with an open source based platform. You know, so, so that's, that's significant, right, that's significant.  But the reality of it is actually that increasingly more and more of the cloud platforms that are available are based on the underlying open source or something like Kubernetes certainly most of them are delivering Linux based operating system. The only experience with open source provides greater long term value from a career. Again, you know, 70% you know it's 67% think that it's important for long term career prospects. 29% this is this is an interesting one because again this is something that I certainly believe for quite some time, and it's really great to see the feedback coming from developers and from hiring managers that actually contributions to open source resulted in better professional opportunities. And I think that this is, this is another important trend because we're seeing more recently that it's not just the vendors that are contributing into these open source communities. It's the users that are bringing some of the best feedback. And you know whether they're working for a large financial institution or whether they're working in healthcare or supply chain what have you. They're starting to become more and more engaged directly in the upstream open source projects that they're basing their, their solutions on. Contributions open source provide more visibility and speaking opportunities and my error of expertise again 67%. This is important. Using open source helps attracts talent. Now again this is something that I think you know I certainly believe for some time. You know, and I'm not a hiring manager. But I do know very many of them and I do know that many of them do look when when they're looking to hire somebody. They check to see are you involved in an open source community you know what's your commit history look like. You know, and they may even ask around in those communities you know what do you think about so and so. So it is increasingly important. This is actually one of those. One of those points that I think actually turns out that the hiring managers actually felt more strongly about this than the developers themselves. Again, it's another sort of data point that you know I think is important to take away from this is that hiring managers, they're on board. And so as developers you need to think about so what are the hiring managers interested in so there's some really interesting data points in this report about that. So contributions to open source impress potential employers and often result in better job opportunities again 65% you know very, very important there. What else we have using open source increases respect and credibility my peers yes open source experience and skills are usually an important factor to determine who to hire. And again, this is another one of those data points that you know, hiring managers felt more strongly by about 5% generally across the board, then the developers themselves again another, another interesting sort of point here. So again, you know just sort of repeating this and this this breaks it down then into so what technologies are people you know our developers you know focused on from a career perspective. That's, you know, 80% right. And, you know, again, 68% felt that it's really, really important to have proficiency proficiency and be a subject matter expert around Linux. And then 57% felt that it helped them get higher pay by becoming an expert in Linux databases came in at number two was 70% containers close behind the 68% and again, you know, this is a newer set of technologies and so we're still growing our proficiency and set of subject matter experts around this. But again, very similar levels of, you know, yeah, this is definitely helped me and get higher pay and so forth container orchestration around Kubernetes here. Again, 52%. Again, slightly newer. But again, it's becoming more and more important. And then AI came in in fifth place here. Technologies like Istio and Knative and so forth were, you know, lesser to lesser degree again they're much newer, not quite as well known, generally. But still, you know, when I look back in the report and digging into the details, you know, the these levels here down to Kubernetes are still greater than the developers responded. Yeah, I need to know, you know, AWS or need to know Azure and so forth, which were less than 50%. 87% of hiring managers considered applicants knowledge of open source and their hiring decisions. That's amazing. And you think about it. And then, you know, the 2020 open source jobs report actually had sort of very similar data in it that reinforcing that 93% of hiring managers said that they're finding it difficult to find the talent with the open source skills that they're looking for, which is up 5% from 2018. And the hiring managers report that knowledge of open source is the most significant impact with 70% more likely to hire a pro open source skills up from 66% in 2018. So again, this is this is clearly sort of, you know, reinforcing and ratifying the same findings. Okay. And again, hiring managers considering OSS important from in terms of hiring decisions. Again, sort of the same sort of set of numbers but again, in both cases, you know, whether it's attracting talent or whether it's, you know, the skills that they're looking for when they're hiring hiring managers, by about 5% in both cases felt more money than the developers themselves. So developers take note. What it so let's open source a good ad or excelling at again, 88% felt that it was leveraging ideas and innovation from a larger community so again, you know, it sort of reinforces that notion that open source is the fuel for much of the innovation that goes on these days. Minimizing vendor lock in we talked about that enabling choice of deployment platforms again as I mentioned, and it's actually also reinforced in another report that just came out yesterday and I didn't have time to put the link in and so forth but the the red hat enterprise open source study their third year in a row now came out and it's basically reinforcing that about two thirds of respondents are saying that they're using multiple clouds. So being able to sort of have the ability to do either portability or certainly portability of skills across a number of different cloud platforms is critically important to many enterprises. It's incredible with my enterprise it environment. Again, we're finding is and this and this is another one of those areas where the hiring managers actually felt more strongly. You know, when when we looked at in the report, you know, who's using open source in your enterprise, hiring managers have actually had a stronger opinion about how much they were using it. You know, significantly more than the general population of the study. And so it's important to their to their hiring decisions because that's basically what's in their enterprise, shortening time to value again 72% and then time to problem resolution and the support thing. It's something that's being worked. And again, I think increasingly you're finding that some vendors are providing support or subscription support for open source itself without sort of any kind of proprietary grapple. So, you know, sort of coming to a conclusion here so enterprise, you know, I should say technology consumers do more than just consume open source if they're going to be effective participants in this in this community. IBM has got a long and I think very positive history in open source. I like to say that we've been doing open source since before it was cool. If your result is me. You know I can say that but basically we were doing open source, even before red hat came into existence. We had IBM engineers and research and in in some of the systems divisions that were working on Linux. It was the very, very early days of Linux were working on developing the Apache HTTP server, you know back in the day as well and and we helped to found the Apache software foundation the Linux foundation the eclipse foundation, you know and then you had a fast forward open stack so I was there with you know the AT&T's and and Intel's and others that you know sort of went all in on open stack, you know, what is it now it's about eight, nine years ago, it seems like yesterday. Creating the open stack foundation, I worked with the pivotal folk to help to stand up the Cloud Foundry Foundation. We were involved in creating the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I helped to set up Hyperledger, you know, OpenJS Foundation, GraphQL, Algeria, you know, various of these communities. IBM has been a significant contributor to and in many cases we actually contributed significant amounts of both resources as well as intellectual property to get these organizations up off the ground. Pardon me, so you know it's really important to sort of complete that virtuous cycle of contribution and not just consumption and in fact one of the points in the report actually does highlight the fact that that it's important that you're seen as contributing to open source as a vendor because it's the sense there is that if you're delivering capability based on that open source it's much better if you're actually contributing. And so our strategy, this is our strategy in a nutshell is that we have this hybrid cloud platform or Red Hat OpenShift and Enterprise Linux as a foundation for a number of capabilities that we deliver through the IBM Cloud Packs, various other SaaS software offerings on the IBM Cloud and or on the in software delivery. And you know with services built on top of all of that, it's all really when you when you sort of drill down into the heart of all of this it's really all about open source. And that's accelerating even further, which makes me very happy. And again we feel that this actually creates a better value for clients right when it's open, you know, you're harnessing the innovation in the open source communities. And we differentiate on top of that but again the underlying API is or something like OpenShift are Kubernetes and you can use the raw Kubernetes API right out of the box.  And hopefully it makes you feel good and hopefully it makes you think about you know the value of open source to your own careers and to your own teams as you're thinking about hiring. So, you know, reiterating what did we learn. Again majority think that knowledge of and contributions open source, give you much better long term job prospects and professional opportunities to grow within your companies. It benefits. The benefits I should say of open source, you know I think are well, you know reinforced with the findings in the study. The developers think that skills related underlying open source is much more important than the proprietary counterparts containers databases and AI are perceived as the most important technologies to know. And then, again, about 50% just over 50% thought that knowledge of these technologies has resulted in higher pay. And so with that, I think I'll turn to questions. We have about 10 minutes left. Great. Yeah, we have one here it says I noticed that the skills of open source and around open source schools are more and more needed and telecommunications. What do you think about building competencies around open telecommunication architects like open ran. I think that again whatever you know whatever domain it is I think that the open sort of side of that, if you will, is probably the one where if I were, you know beginning my career, that's where I would focus. I think, you know, again, the choice of you know which industry, you know which, which vertical you want to focus in is probably yours but yeah I mean I think I think definitely focusing in on communities that are focused on delivering open source capabilities to a given domain are going to be more successful than focusing on proprietary solutions. And you know again you're seeing, again, in many cases, you're seeing in the telecommunications industry for instance you're seeing the AT&T and the horizon and so forth. They're engaged in these open source communities around networking and so forth so absolutely. Great. This next one is a little bit long so bear with me. Because since 2018 at least five multi billion dollar companies, Redis Labs, Cockroach Labs, Confluent, publicly traded MongoDB and recently Elastic have changed their software licenses to block Amazon from reselling their software to AWS is massive customer base representing a combined market capitalization of about $42 billion. In conclusion of Elastic, these companies appear to be driving momentum in favor of business models built around more restrictive licensing and sending a signal to emerging open source startup seeking to compete with Amazon's cloud division. Do you see a battle over open source business models and movement towards more restrictive licensing. You know this is one of those. This is a really good question. And it's very topical. I think you know many would say that open source isn't the business model, and I think that's correct. But what is a business model is what do you do with the software and delivering a service. You know whether it's a SaaS offering or delivering software offering and this, you know the services and support around it are real. That's where the real value is not so much the code. And again the value of open source is in the community that builds up around it. And I'm not going to, you know, pick on any particular vendors. In this particular case but I will just say that it. There, there are some who are takers, if you will, you know some who are basically just exploiting the fact that here's this free thing and I'm just going to go use it and contribute very little. This is the way of the virtuous cycle of contribution back. And I think that's sad. It's a reality. But again, it's, it's, it's not something to be solved necessarily by changing one's license to make it essentially not open source. It's actually cutting off the, the contributions and so forth, his developers are looking for the ability to contribute back the ability to know that they're contributing to something that they could use that they could fork that they could, you know, they can do so without, you know, sort of falling afoul of the license. And I'll just say, again, you know, and I highlighted the fact that IBM has been a, I think a very good partner from an open source perspective because we have been contributing back for so long and certainly, you know, from a red hat perspective, that's their, that is their business model, you know, everything that red hat does is based on upstream software upstream open source software. And yet they're doing pretty well from a business perspective. Now are they exclusively the developers for something, you know, no, they they try to build communities that's the whole point is building a diverse community. And making it so that you know becoming part of that community isn't important. It is important to its exploitation. So, yeah, it's, it's sad when we see, you know, those examples that you gave. And I don't, I don't like it any more than any of them do. Right. But the reality of it is, I don't think it's the license that matters, I think, again, it's the community. And, you know, anytime you try and retain control, that's when you tend to lose it. I have about five minutes left, but we have a whole bunch of questions here to get through so I will try to get through them all. David says, apologies if I missed something but how many companies extend software asset management and license management to OSS. If they don't does this cause problems. And how many companies are confident about what OSS they have where it is and what depends on it like OSS config management. This is a really, really good point. I didn't, I didn't bring it up. It's not really a focus of the study but you know, establishing a practice within your organization for effectively managing monitoring and providing sort of policy based governance around the open source that you both consume as well as contribute to, I think is fundamentally important. And it's one of the things that I talked to with clients about all the time. Right, they're asking, how does IBM deal with open source. And, you know, some of them are coming at it from, you know, sort of the license aspect of things right how do we not run a follow of, you know, doing the wrong thing from a licensing perspective but it's also, I think fundamentally important to understand so what technology, what open source technology have you consumed in developing your application your solutioning, you know, in your in your data center and so forth. I understand so that when there is a vulnerability that's reported, how can I get it patched, and should I be, you know, establishing this sort of a practice for ensuring that, you know, if there's a, you know, a zero day vulnerability published, you know that I'm acting quickly to remediate that in my in my enterprise by having a clear understanding about where is something being used. And there are there are vendors out there that provide tooling that allows you to sort of, you know, scan the software, build up a database of use and so forth, within your within your enterprise. And I would highly encourage, you know, every company to sort of establish a, what we call an open source program office that essentially manages, you know, developing the policy and enforcing the policy to a certain extent. Without it becoming onerous, you know, without it becoming an impediment to getting anything done, but having a clear appreciation for what you have in your enterprise is very important. Okay, great. And this is a more general question. And how do we start contributing to open source as a person early in their career. Do we find the right projects to start contributing to, should we look for an easy project to start with, or do we select a project learn its design and source code and then start contributing. Now this is a great question. And you know, my answer to this would be pick something that interests you. Oftentimes, the best. Well, the interest comes from, you know, it's something that you're using right there. There's a saying you know you're, you're scratching an inch, right. And that's where a lot of innovation comes from. And so, if you're using some technology or some tool, and you like that tool but you think it could be a little bit better. Right, that might be a good place to start. But you can start with, you know, necessarily writing code.  There are jerks out there obviously but you know for the most part people are very respectful in these communities. You can start with, you know, maybe helping out from a documentation perspective, get if you're a user, and maybe you know better than others about how it should be used and how you should document it or maybe you understand where the documentation is lacking and you can help fill in some of the blanks there. And the other place that you can help out is just in triaging things right, you know, going through an issues list and making sure that the issue is both well described but also provides with an ability to test that the defect is in fact found. So you can just help by triaging and saying yes this is, you know, fully documented it provides the testing necessary to sort of prove that the defect is there. And you don't have to fix it, but you can help by doing that bit of triage and it helps the maintainers of the community to be more efficient in responding to issues and so forth.  Then there are some that are so small that they can be, you know, kind of crickets, if you will, and not necessarily her responsive either, you know, finding, you know, the sort of doing the Goldilocks thing of finding the one that's sort of just right. So that is really going to be based on your own personal preferences, the things that interest you, and things maybe that you're using, or maybe where you know there's the best place to start. Next question we have is from Jay, he asks, in your personal vision, do you think we'll move to a more transparent open source like world in the tech space, if so why and what will that world look like. So, so this is, this is a great question. And, you know, it's actually something that I'm, you know, I'm passionate about and I'm working on, you know, when IBM IBM has been involved in open source like I said since before it was cool, you know, back in the early 1990s and obviously we think that it's so cool now that we spent $34 billion on a company, Red Hat, and that that's based exclusively on open source. I have a saying, you know, open source all the things.  I'm not. Again, I tend to think that, you know, the value of something isn't in the software itself it's not in the code. It's in the support and services you're able to build around it and the, the things that you can do with it, that are much more valuable than the software itself. And, and, you know, being able to sort of have, and I'll take as an example, you know, sort of Kubernetes as an example, they're like 4000 people a year that contribute to Kubernetes or some of the sort of adjacent projects. That's insane. There is no company on the planet that has 4000 engineers working on something. So there is innovation coming from all walks of life, you know, from every, you know, just about everywhere on the planet. All bringing their, you know, either their, their experience and using it in trying to help improve it over time. And, and so they're able to do things that I don't think even Google could have imagined doing on their own. And I think more and more people are starting to sort of get it that that's actually where we're going to innovate. And so, yeah, I tend to think that, you know, generally, the trend is to more and more open source and less and less close source, and that even the proprietary offerings are starting to become a little bit less proprietary, the secret sauce sprinkled in and more, let's just deliver the open source effectively and consistently and provide the best support and services we can for it. Great. Next question. Without open source technologies like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker and Ansible, properly integrated to make fog commuting possible. Was this possible using proprietary software? How do you see the future of fog and cloud working together? So, um, so again, I think when I think about something like this, it's really, it's sort of the same message as the hybrid cloud message that, you know, IBM and Red Hat have been harping on. There's, there's no one cloud. There is cloud, right, which is really this fog of different cloud providers and on-premises deployments. And ideally, you shouldn't be worrying necessarily about where it is, but we can integrate these things together. I think that without open source, we couldn't be pulling this off. Again, you know, when I think back in my career to the early 2000s when we're doing web services with Microsoft, it would take us, you know, about a year and a half to deliver a standard to, you know, a specification that we could both ratify, you know, this is IBM and Microsoft, but, you know, the community generally would ratify and agree on and then took another, you know, nine to 18 months to deliver capability based on that open standard, right. And so innovation was slowed. And what happened was the rest of the world just sort of said, well, we can't wait for this, we're moving on, right, and they went down a different path that was based on a lot of open source capabilities and rest and so forth. And so at the end of the day, you know, you have to look at that and say, okay, so did what Microsoft and IBM do and, you know, not just us but, you know, the other vendors out there at the time, what was their mistake? Well, their mistake was being slow and not sort of seeing the fact that, you know, opening things up has actually enabled much more rapid innovation and makes it easier to do those types of integrations. So, you know, again, I definitely think that increasingly we're starting to see just about every dimension of technology is being sort of consumed by open source. All right, we have about four minutes left. So we could probably have time for maybe two more questions. I'm going to take this last one that I see about IBM and professors to be open source. Why haven't we opened up risk and power offerings? We actually did. Open power is a thing it's been a thing for a while. And, and so yeah, the power hardware and the power API is and so forth are all open source. It's contributing to it and it's being, it's actually, it's quite popular in certainly in China, it's popular we have Google and various other vendors participating and contributing to the development of open power. And so, yeah, we have now again, I keep working to try and open up more and more and more and I, you know, we're seeing that happen. Take a look out on the IBM organization on GitHub, I think we are approaching 2000 repositories under there. Two years ago, it was less than 1000. It was more like, you know, 100 and four years ago it was, it was crickets. So, you know, increasingly more and more capabilities that IBM once held is proprietary or going out as open source and increasingly, even the things that are fundamental to our future success things like quantum computing. We've open source we open source the kiss kit SDK for the quantum computer. And we've also open source the, the assembly language specification. Cosm. And, and there's probably going to be more. But it's not just that it's, you know, AI machine learning models around fairness, and, and robustness have been open source and contributed into the Linux Foundation so there's an awful lot that we open source now is everything open source but again increasingly more and more is, and the pressure from the most senior management you know again if anybody gets open source it's Arvin Krishna, who basically was the powerhouse behind the red hat acquisition and so you know I think the end of the day, you know, we have more open with each passing day. Time for maybe one more question. I'm not going to comment on rumors there was also threatened by it for enterprise. I don't I don't see open source is necessarily threatening enterprises unless they don't jump on the band. I don't see it as a threat necessarily. You see any other here that you might be able to answer in our just last moments. Can I comment on the alignment between the IBM and red hat open source offices. We have a good relationship we don't, you know, you know IBM and red hat have this sort of wall between them we're trying to sort of remain somewhat independent of one another for a variety of business reasons. We do have a very solid relationship with red hat in our upstream communities, where we both participate, and we do coordinate on some things like, you know, who's going to, you know, take the lead and organization acts increasingly many of the open source companies that we participate in together are, you know, putting in bylaws that say that only one of an affiliated set of companies can be represented on a board so obviously we have to do some coordination around something like that.  We each are going out on our own paths. So much. Well, it's my pleasure. I hope everybody got something out of this. And again, feel free to hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn. We're responsive to Twitter than I am on LinkedIn. And please do download and read the report. I think you'll find it very valuable. Thank you so much to Chris for his time today and thank you to all the participants who joined us. As a reminder, this recording will be on the Linux Foundation YouTube page later today. And we hope you're able to join us for future webinars. Have a wonderful day. All right, thank you.


Hi, and welcome to Seymour's World Commentary on Think Tech Hawaii. You can find all my commentaries and all Seymour's World episodes on the Think Tech Hawaii website. I welcome your comments by email, text, or phone. You can reach me at Seymour.Kazimersky at gmail.com or<PHONE_NUMBER>. Today our topic is a matter of motivation. Have you ever set a goal for yourself that you were sure you would accomplish only to abandon it less than a day or a week or a month later? Like many individuals across this country, I did, and I continue to do so almost every day. Sound familiar? Of course. Like most of you, I have had to renew my goals over and over again. I would love to tell you that it worked out, and I'm still on that healthy lifestyle bandwagon that I'm doing everything I can, but unfortunately, I have made more trips to the drive-through window than I care to admit. Whether it is adopting a healthier lifestyle or saving money or quitting a bad habit, most of us have gone through the disappointment of not sticking to our goals. The common culprit is simple lack of motivation. According to statistics, approximately 45% of Americans make New Year's resolutions each year. And how many do you think really could go through with them? Only 8% achieve the resolutions. However, lack of motivation is not just a problem related to New Year's resolutions. It's also a problem in work, education, and our personal journey. Did you know that 54% of workers in the U.S. and Canada reported feeling unmotivated or not engaged at work? Actually, 40% of U.S. high school students were actively disengaged in school. So what is behind the lack of motivation, and how do we solve the problem? I think there are a number of factors that lead to lack of motivation, and identifying them is an important step in overcoming them. The habit of procrastination. It's a common reason for not following through with our goals. Telling ourselves we'll start tomorrow, or waiting until the last minute, many times leads to not doing it at all. There is also the fear of failure. Avoiding doing something for fear that you might not succeed and embarrass yourself may be keeping us from achieving our goals. A lack of incentives and outside motivators may also be holding us back. Once the reason for our lack of motivation is identified, changing the way we think might be helpful in solving the problem. This is a practice used by cognitive therapists. Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that we think a certain way about an event. We develop a feeling about it, and so we act a certain way. For example, when I go through the drive-thru window, I think, I'll just treat myself today, and tomorrow I'll get back on track. Then I feel good and happy about my thought, so I end up buying the fast food. Afterward, I might tell myself I failed and feel disappointed in myself, so I'll act accordingly. By becoming aware of what your thoughts are, about your goals, you can learn to shift them, which in turn will change your behavior. The next time I drive by a fast food establishment and think of stopping, I can remind myself of the disappointment it caused, and refocus my thoughts towards my real goals. Then I will be more likely to go home and make a healthy meal. If you are guilty of procrastinating, then think back to what your results have been in the past. Did you have desirable or undesirable outcomes? If you had mostly undesirable outcomes, what will you tell yourself the next time a similar situation arises? Reminding yourself that maybe saving things until the last minute might not be the best choice is a great way to help shift your thoughts and get back on track. The same applies to fear of failure and embarrassment. If you are thinking that you're going to fail and make a fool of yourself, chances are you're not going to follow through. However, if you tell yourself there's an opportunity for growth and learning, you may be more inclined to continue pursuing your goals. Motivation is part of our everyday life. It is the driving force behind most of our decisions. By learning how to boost motivation and change our thinking, we can break the habits that hold us back from achieving our goals and attaining success. So what is the key to reaching our goals? Keep that motivation going. I hope this helps you have a great day. My name is Seymour Kazimerski. You're watching a commentary of Seymour's World. You can find all my commentaries and Seymour's World episodes on the ThinkTech Hawaii website. I welcome your comments by email, text, or phone. And you can reach me at Seymour.Kazimerski at gmail.com or<PHONE_NUMBER>. Aloha.