2016 marks the largest OpenStack Summit yet. With more than 7,600 attendees in Austin, Texas, and numerous partnerships, it is safe to say OpenStack has arrived. Back at home in Texas, OpenStack is flourishing amid its native state’s southern hospitality.

“I never thought I’d become an open licensing geek in my life,” said Mark Collier, founder and COO of OpenStack Foundation. Collier joined Jonathan Bryce, executive director at OpenStack, for an interview with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

The impact of the developer community

Bryce said that two of the morning’s keynote speakers were “incredibly brilliant.” He also credited the success of OpenStack to the real-world use cases and demos available because of the developer community.

Collier waxed philosophically about the “dichotomy” associated with open-source tech, commenting that previously major corporations considered open source to be akin to “socialism.” Nevertheless, attitudes have greatly changed largely due to the success of companies like Facebook and Twitter, Inc. Therefore, application developers like Apache and OpenStack have capitalized on what Collier described as “a change in the community,” which has left “no excuse to dictate” tech.

Bryce concentrated on the “broader context” OpenStack has achieved. He continued stating that mixing together the right components like a “recipe” has transformed OpenStack from an “idea or buzzword” into “something useful.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE