LinuxCon 2015 brings together some of the brightest minds in technology today. What makes Linux attractive to such talent? Duncan Johnston-Watt, founder and CEO of Cloudsoft Corp., feels that Linux is playing a key role in the community’s ability to collaborate.

Johnston-Watt stopped by  theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media, to speak with host Jeff Frick about the role Cloudsoft is playing within the community.

Bringing the community to the cloud

Cloudsoft is an open source application-management provider and according to the company founder, they are the curators of Apache Brooklyn, which is a well-established incubator project.

Johnston-Watt said, “Apache Brooklyn is a standard based way to model applications. People talk a lot about blueprints that capture the topology of an application along with the policies you want to apply to it when you actually run it. Apache Brooklyn allows the blueprint to deploy and run in any environment be it virtual, physical or cloud.”

The company also recently released Clocker, which lets you spin up a Docker-based cloud. Containers are a hot topic and the Cloudsoft team thought they were missing the ability to stand up a Docker based cloud that was self-managed and had the capability to scale and present itself in containers on demand. “We wanted to treat it as a first-class destination for blueprints. The motivation was to run the blueprints in a cloud,” explained Johnston-Watt.

Keynote hot topics

Johnston-Watt compares open source to 21^st century alchemy. He said, “It is a magical transformation where you take base matter and turn it into something new and exciting.”

The other big discussion is about collaboration. Johnston-Watt is excited by the way open source allows you to compose things shedding light on projects already taking place. However, he mostly sees open source as, “Having that open-minded kind of attitude that collectively we can do way more.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of LinuxCon 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE