UPDATED 14:32 EDT / JUNE 30 2016

NEWS

Three open-source partners and a wedding: A groundbreaking keynote at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

As the day two afternoon keynotes commenced at the Red Hat Summit 2016, held in San Francisco, partnership and collaboration were the themes. Industry leaders for SparkFun, Cisco Systems, Inc. and Accenture, LLP spoke about their open source stories. At the conclusion of the presentations, the audience was also surprised with a partnership of a different kind: A surprise wedding on stage.

Create openly

Nathan Seidle, founder and CEO of SparkFun Electronics, Inc., was the first speaker up during the keynote. His company is an online retailer of electronic parts for people to use to build their own products, but the true goal is to promote inventing in an open-source environment.

Seidle begins by telling the audience that the ideas of patents are costly and expensive. As an electrical engineer, he said he would rather create and share ideas to make products better. “I don’t have the time, money or really stomach to go litigating all over the world,” he said.

Seidle is also one of the founding Board members of a movement called the Open Source Hardware Association, a neutral forum for discussion of open-source hardware. He explained how it works: “You provide the plans, the editable source file, for the thing you created … you put it out there and tell the world they can modify it, they can take my design, do whatever they want with it, they can even sell it for actual dollars.”

He continued to say that people are going to do whatever they want with it because if you release a product into the world, it will be reverse engineered, modified for easier manufacturing and sold. The only thing different about open-source hardware is that they have Prior Art, so when the product is released into the world through open source, there is a way (through YouTube videos, dates and notes, etc.) to validate your invention and exclude it from getting patented by someone else.

“This process is better for humans and better for business. If your idea can be sold, it will be,” he said.

Opening up the network

Next up was Dave Ward, CTO of Engineering and chief architect at Cisco Systems, who has been collaborating in open-source networking and working with Red Hat for the past six years He noted that open source is critical for success and innovation in technology, stating that Cisco has integrated open source into its portfolio. It has also helped contribute back to move the industry forward.

Ward outlined his work on creating a network platform that is easier for developers to use. “The target assumption of the application developers in the audience is that ‘For the love of God, can infrastructure just do what I need it to do? And do I need to know everything about the orchestration just to get my job done?’ And we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to make that happen,” Ward said.

He stated how it is impossible for the whole stack to fit in just any one individual’s head, so it’s hard to get their job done. His argument is that the world should have a no-stack developer. The target the project is trying to reach is to have developers work in an application PaaS view.

Working with Red Hat to develop a better workflow, next week the company announced the release of a new platform for data analytics, due out next week. “This is about the developers in the community. The goal is good workflow analysis,” Ward explained.

Ward said that the project is looking to expand the stack and the community working on this project. When working in an open-source environment, Ward believes that overlapping is a good thing because it breeds innovation.

Enabling a culture for open source

Sven Loberg, managing director at Accenture, LLP, was the final presenter during the keynote. His talk covered three areas: open-source innovation, examples of partnering, and community engagement and contribution. Like all the speaker before him, he felt that open source contributes to innovation within the entire industry, and he outlined what his company is doing to enable open-source contributions.

He said the key enablers for open source at Accenture are to be community driven on an internal level. The company’s Inner Source platform hosts more than 3,000 active projects at Accenture. The company also updated its open-source policy to make it easier to contribute.

Its community is also on GitHub for more visibility and openness with the community, and it enables them to blog about the projects going on.

Lastly, the company took open-source governance one step further by adding Black Duck Software to enhance open-source security and management.

Loberg said that it is important to contribute in order to bring diversity and different points of view, which create more value to the project and the community. Accenture is expanding its work in open source to give back to the community.

A true partnership first

After the presentations, there was one more demonstration to take place. Marriage as a Service. Paul Cormier, EVP of Engineering and president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, presided over the wedding of Shannon Montague, an American sign language interpreter, and Matt Hargrave, a senior Linux engineer with GM Financial, a groundbreaking event in Red Hat keynote history.

Watch the touching video below where two self-claimed geeks get married on stage at the Red Hat Summit 2016. Watch the full keynote video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo via Red Hat Summit keynote

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