Techstrong Gang – March 24, 2025

Hey, everyone, like the old Motown song where the IT Jobs Are. You're watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Monday. Alan Shimmel here from Tex Strong and we've, wow, what a weekend. I hope you guys had a great weekend.

I had a great weekend. Um, got to enjoy some of that South Florida weather a little bit. So, good movie.

We could talk about it, but you probably don't want to hear. Um, what you do wanna hear about is what we gotta talk about today. And I mentioned we're gonna talk about where are the IT jobs.

We talk a little bit SoftBank and open source LLMs in cybersecurity. Oh my. Um, let me introduce you to our gang on this fine Monday morning.

First of all, uh, he's the newest member of our gang, really. He's from, he's, he's genuinely from Austin, Texas. He's a good friend of ours.

He can tell you more about himself, but you know, some people call him R two R squared. Big Lebowski, though. He's not wearing his sweater today, my friend Robert Reeves.

Hey, Robert. How are you man? It's good to see you.

I'm doing well. Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's getting a little warm for the sweater. Um, and yeah, just super excited to be here.

You know, I'm always passionate about developers, open source and, uh, creating jobs through startups. Uh, those are the three things that I care the most about. Good for you, and I know that firsthand.

Welcome. Moving on from Robert. I feel like I just introduced her, but that was probably that, uh, webinar round table we did yesterday, right?

Or last week actually, my time goes. She is the CEO of Deploy hub, open source defender extraordinaire, board foundation member on several, our friend Tracy Reagan. Hey, Tracy, it's great to have you on.

You as well, Alan. This is gonna be a fun one. We have Robert Here.

Yes, he, he'll keep it moving. And then finally move, moving up to, uh, upstate New York where he is still waiting for the Yankee season to start. He's our, uh, chief Content Officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, just a few more days, Approximately 80 hours, but who's counting? Yep. Yep.

Who's counting? Alright, guys, let's kick this. Fine.

Monday off with, uh, recent article was over in Techstrong, ITSM about, uh, mixed signals on the, uh, tech role or tech job front. You know, I have a lot of friends who, for the first time in their lives are not finding easy picking, getting new jobs. I probably had three or four people write me last week alone if I knew of any, um, roles open.

Good, good people too. Mike. What, what's going on here?

All right, well, let me set this up a little bit. So, CompTIA, which is this industry association, does this regular analysis of statistics provided by the Department of Labor related to IT jobs. Now it's the Department of Labor, and we all know that, well, there could be some given those numbers, but they're showing that there's an uptick in jobs of about 177,000.

Not all of them are in big tech, though. And so, um, that came out. And same time, Washington Post has a article noting that those same statistics, which suggests that, uh, 25% of all programmer jobs have disappeared, but they made a distinction between programmers and developers.

And programmers are people who code, and developers are people who actually create applications. Robert, I know you've looked at all these stories, and I, and I know you've been close to this topic for a while, but what the heck's going on here? Well, I, um, thank you, Mike.

I mean, look, the, you know, that Washington Post article about the distinction between programmers and developers, um, uh, you know, there was a little bit of clickbait to that title, certainly saying that, Ooh, is this the first, uh, bit of evidence we have that AI is destroying, uh, computer programmer jobs? Um, and yes, there was a dip. Um, but, uh, you know, one of the things that, uh, really jumped out at me in the article was that, I guess paragraph six or seven, it starts talking about the advance, the advancements prior to ai, um, around DevOps, cloud native, open source.

You know, these are things that, you know, certainly, uh, uh, Tracy Allen and I are, are at fault for, um, because this increased, uh, productivity for everyone in, uh, software. You know, I, I think that it is way too early to start doing the chicken. Little sky is falling stuff about ai.

Uh, I'm reminded of the, um, you know, uh, uh, story in Willy Wonka, the new one, uh, not the original. Um, about, uh, the, you know, Charlie's dad loses his job at the toothpaste factory because he was putting caps on tubes of toothpaste. Of course, you fast forward to the end, unfortunately, I'm doing a spoiler here, hope you've seen it.

Where he gets a job, uh, repairing the machine that puts the cap on toothpaste. Um, I do think that there is going to be a massive shift in how we build software, and we really don't know where this is going. The good news is, is that we've seen these massive shifts before, whether it was virtualized machines, containers, DevOps, uh, and now certainly with ai, um, we have an opportunity as an industry and also as individuals to improve our skillset.

Um, but we are still, you know, our more technical minded folks, our programmers, uh, are still going to have a place to be. It's just companies right now after a massive hiring boom, uh, during covid, uh, it is just correcting right now. Um, and also with some economic uncertainty, macroeconomic challenges, companies are just tapping the brakes.

Uh, I think that's all. It's, I don't know, Alan jump in here for a minute, but I'll add one thing besides that. I mean, I just think a lot of folks are also getting better at copy and pasting stuff so that they're not actually typing.

So, you know, let, let's, let's, let's peel this back. The, the, the news here, and you see it running on your ticker, what does it actually mean? Well, it, employment grew by 177,000.

That means jobs that have sort of an IT title could be programmers, CIS admin, help desk, whatever, a network administrator. It could be anything related to it. And it, and it, and overwhelmingly it's probably it in every industry under the sun, from healthcare to finance and banking, to manufacturing, to newspapers and media and everything else.

It's not necessarily tech sector jobs, but they're tech jobs, tech sector jobs. So the tech community, the tech company companies, right? The kinds of companies that sponsor tech strong events, the kinds of companies that make the solutions.

You out here watching this use, those companies had 11,000 and changed fewer jo new jobs hired in February. So the tech center, the tech sector, the tech industry is hiring less people. Tech jobs are increasing.

So that, that's the, that's the dichotomy here, right? You like that word dichotomy? Um, now what does it mean though?

Well, I'll tell you what it means. And I think Robert and Mike, you're both somewhat correct, but let, let, really what's going on here is the tech sector has been frozen by paralysis with analysis since almost the end of Covid. They did go on a drunken hiring spree during Covid, they way Overhired.

And then since then, they've way over fired, right? They've laid off, I forgot what the numbers are, but it's over a million, 2 million, whatever people. Um, and it's not that the e economy is bad, right?

If you look at the eco economic sort of indicators, they've certainly gone down since a certain person got sworn in as president, but they're not terrible, terrible enough where we should see less jobs and stuff like this. But what we are dealing with is uncertainty. And I said it before, I'll say it again.

Businesses don't thrive in an uncertainty. If you have an UNC economic climate, an uncertain political climate, an uncertain socioeconomic climate, people tend to freeze up. They tighten up.

And that's what you're dealing with. People are, people are not sure what to do. Tracy, you know, you read articles too, where people are now quite literally denigrating the employees in big tech, especially out in the valley.

They're saying they got lazy, they've been pampered, they're not really good employees. And, and that's why we're laying them off because they represent the bottom 10 or 15%. And yet, I think, you know, to Alan's point, it kind of smells like a cover up for over hiring in the first place.

But I don't know, what do you think? Yeah, they're out there playing golf. That's a reflection of somebody, right?

But, you know, um, when I talk to my open source community, which gives me kind of a, you know, it allows me to keep my thumb on the sort of the pulse of what's happening out there. People are struggling to find work right now. Um, and what I'm seeing is a pivot in skills.

So they may have done less hiring, but there are job openings out there that they can't fill because they're asking for skills that have not developed yet, especially around ai. They're looking for the, this, you know, perfect AI developer candidate, somebody who's had five years experience in LLMs and is unrealistic, right? And I've seen those, I've seen those job openings, and it makes me scratch my head and say, where are they gonna find such a person?

So while I know that the there is, we are going through a pivot in skills, and there are less jobs out there. There will, we are gonna see more jobs opening up in these areas, but they're just gonna have different skill sets. And the other thing that I'm seeing and ad hearing is it's so much harder to find work now because of the way hiring is done.

Um, AI bots, uh, you know, that try to match resumes, uh, there's a lot of bias in them. Um, they, uh, aren't necessarily, the human has been removed, right? The human factor has been removed out of the job hiring process.

So we have a whole new world of how to find jobs, whole new world. Um, we, it was, it's, it was so prevalent in the community that the outreach community of the Ortel project has started a job seekers webinar program. The first thing we did is we had a, um, individual, uh, to come in and teach us all how to update and brand our ourselves in LinkedIn, because everybody's using LinkedIn profiles and developers, you know, they're not writers, they're not storytellers.

So they struggle with, uh, with being able to brand themselves. Our next webinar, we're gonna cover, you know, what companies look for. What are some of the tricks you can do on your resume to try to get a better match to the, uh, to the job opening, to beat the bots.

It's kind of a beat the bots, uh, webinar. So I think that there's two things happening. We're having a pivot and skills people with, uh, with, you know, maybe if you, we are writing in Rust.

Rust is becoming popular now. You've been doing Python, now they're gonna be looking for rust developers instead of Python developers. Uh, and, and there is a, there is a slow down, no doubt there's a slow down in hiring, but I think it's gonna be temporary even with the current administration as cybersecurity becomes more important.

And the, the private sector has to address this, the public sector's not, uh, and I think that AI is going to create a whole new brand of, of developers. So we just have to wait and we have to get scaled up in the meantime so that we are doing smaller little projects. The Ortel project, I'm, I'm really gonna, uh, pitch to them that we should start building an LLM even if we're not gonna use it, just so they have some experience in doing it.

Um, so there's a, there's a, there's many things that we need to do as software developers or programmers, uh, to make ourselves more relevant. And that's just what we're going through. I'm suspicious of one thing though.

We, every Monday we publish, uh, a post called Five Great DevOps Jobs Opportunities, right? And so I spend the weekend going through all those DevOps listings, and you know, on average there's like maybe 6,000 new listings every week related to a DevOps job. Now, some of those are duplicate 'cause somebody updated it or reposted it, but there are thousands of these openings.

And what I have noticed though, is a lot of those openings are no longer in Northern California, but there's a lot more of 'em in other places, including Florida and Texas, and even New York. And there's also a lot of job openings in places like Minnesota. And so maybe people actually have to go move somewhere that they're not in today because, well, that region is not hiring Well, I think that that's part of the problem, right?

We've had a mass exodus out of San Francisco, it's too expensive to live there. So now we have developers moving to different places. I mean, Santa Fe, I wouldn't have thought this would be a developer.

I thought it was where rich people went to retire, to be quite honest. And we have a, you know, it's, it's amazing the community that has come from California who has moved to Santa Fe, and many of them come from the tech business, and they're looking for re remote work no matter where it's at. So we, it's, we've gone through quite a shift.

I really do believe that. And I think it's gonna take some time to settle down. And you know what, the big tech companies have been holding on to cash for a very long time.

Let's admit that. Mm-hmm. Well, to your, they haven't done, they haven't done hiring To, to your Point, just last week, I noticed there was a DevOps opening At Los Alamos National Labs.

So there you go. There You go. There you go.

Well, I will, I will say this. You know, whenever you have a shift in technology, um, you individuals can go and learn about that technology. Um, and certainly, uh, you know, Tracy, you know, having an LOM in Nortels, I mean, I think that's great, just giving you the community an opportunity and seeing if it's gonna provide value to the open source project.

That's awesome. Um, but I, I do wanna caution people that are going to, um, seek to, um, look at where they are, kind of missing skills. Um, and I do think it's great to get familiar with maybe building, uh, some kind of predictive AI model.

I I'm working on one myself for sorting Lego bricks, uh, so that I can learn about this stuff. But when we're seeking to increase our skills, you are going to get more return for your investment by maximizing the things that you are already good at, um, and seeking to be the best in that area. Uh, if you are going from zero to passable with a skill, okay, that's good, but it's going to be very hard to become an expert in that area.

I think that you're gonna get more, you're gonna have a greater advantage by investing in areas that you're already an expert on and seeing how those skills can apply to things like ai. Um, and, and, but remember in, uh, both of these articles, uh, we did see soft skills, being able to speak, uh, have conversations. Those sorts of things are gonna be very important, have always been important.

And especially where there's more competition for jobs, uh, being able to have a personal connection with companies that you're connecting with, leveraging LinkedIn, uh, learning how to do that, uh, that is a skillset that is far easier to master than say, building your own gen ai, uh, model. Yeah. In fact, in that point, um, one of the employers we talked to before we started the series, uh, said that out of 800 people that they hired, only 10% of them came from, um, you know, somebody submitting a resume, kind of a cold a hire.

The rest were from networking. Yeah, no. 90% seeing A lot of that.

And, and, and that's what people had. I, I will tell you, last week, as I mentioned earlier, I think I had four or five people reach out to me, friends, good people who said, Hey, one was been outta work since the first of the year. Uh, one just recently, one's still employed, but look at and move along.

Uh, but basically they're not, you know, they're not getting the calls from the recruiters like they used to. And they're not just popping in with jobs. They're, you know, do you know anyone hiring in this?

Especially, I will tell you and Dere, right? Dere has been, Dere has been hit Harding. Yeah, it has Decimated, yeah.

Yeah. But lemme just say one other thing. How many people have lost their job because of ai?

Anybody? I I, I have a hard time. Me, Me too.

I think people using Wait, Wait for, for real? Or because somebody wrote that in a press release. 'cause there's a difference.

Well, I, I meant for real. Exactly right. How many people, I don't know of any lost their job because of AI nonsense.

In fact, the, uh, one of our, our kind of junior contributors, uh, he's been with us for three years, but he started, when he first started university, his first job was in ai. So it created a job for him, right? Right.

Outta school. I don't know. You know what I noticed over the years too, it's like, you know, people are getting hired because they go to a conference and they'll sit around in a table and they meet a couple of folks and, you know, that's how they network.

And, you know, there always seemed to be like a lot of cross recruiting going on in any of these conferences. Ira went to, including all the ones from the CNCF. And it seems to me, if you need a job, the place to go is any of those conferences in person is a good place to start.

And, you know, the, in the universities in India, um, they really push their, their, uh, it, um, students to join an open source project because they tell 'em it's a good way to get project, uh, real life skills. You've gotta work with the team, you're gonna network with, with companies. Some of these projects are led by the likes of Microsoft and IBM who have people in there.

If you wanna network from India with a US company, the best way to do that is to join an open source project and start becoming known, right? And I don't see that coming from, I, I we hardly ever see students coming from, um, us uh, universities. Never, ever.

They never, there's, they're not there. And we, we always have a, a, a steady stream of students coming out of India who wanna get involved. Hmm, Interesting stuff.

Hey, we gotta take a break here on the gang. Let's come back and we'll move over to our B block today, which is, uh, SoftBank scoops up, uh, uh, a company, I hope that didn't come outta the reserve. They set aside to invest here in AI data centers.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, folks, we're back. And yes, uh, there's a company called ampi Computing.

5 billion. Maybe chu change in the age of ai, I don't know. But, um, we don't know whether SoftBank, who acquired these folks, is doing that as to meet their commitment to the US or if it's part of some larger plan.

But Tracy, when I looked at it, the first thing that did pop into my mind was, holy crap, we want a contract with the US government now. We gotta actually do something about it. And so here's Ampire, but what's your take?

So we all know that, uh, you know, chips are a big deal right now. Um, and having more technology and more IP in the US around chip manufacturing is critical. We've talked about this before.

We, it can't be all centered in Taiwan. Um, I'm super excited about this story, though, not because of the chips. And the reason why I pushed to get this one is because this company was founded by Renee James, who I've been watching for a time.

5 billion. Can we like, have a dance or something? That's, you know, What, A day too late for International Women's Day.

But you know what? You're right. Oh my God, Tracy, that's Fanta, what a great story.

I wasn't aware of this at all. This, to me, this has, you know, made this story so important. It really did, because we have so many women founded companies who have, are who, who just women founded, who are turning into unicorns so few.

And this is a great story about how she did that. And she did it at a very important time. And yes, we do need chips that can, that are gonna be more sustainable and that can, um, be more, um, I guess you could say energy friendly.

So, yay, I am so happy about this story. And you know, Renee, James, thank you, thank you for leading the way and showing women how to do it. And that you don't have to be a young woman outta school who's on a pot, potentially a team, a team of, of founders that is still led by a male counterpart.

So to me, this is the big story, is that a woman took this business, uh, to this level in this, in the amount of time that she did. Uh, and I hope that she gets more attention around it. Great story, man.

I I will say good for middle-aged people anyway, not, it's not just younger. Yes, Youngs out There, I know, but a middle aged woman, you know, last year, vvc, 1% of funding went to women in VC funding went to women 1%. 99% is going to men.

1% is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. But she proves that a woman is worth being, uh, investing in, right?

Well, I hope after this exit, you know, uh, she takes some of her winnings and starts a venture capital fund and corrects that. Um, you know, I, I can imagine a no better person to invest in startups in hardware than her, um, as an operator and as a founder. She knows what it takes to build and grow companies.

Um, and, and I hope that that's what happens next. I'm a little concerned that the cost of startups in the age of AI is gonna be prohibitively high. And so there might not be as many startups, because, you know, you're gonna see companies now require if, what $2 billion is the Annie just to get started.

I mean, how Well that, that's, if they're looking to create their own, uh, their own LLM or, you know, models and, and and so forth training, uh, you know what, Mike, that's frankly an argument I heard when the web first came out, when the cloud first came out. And it's always that, that high, that high barrier to entry. And the high barrier to entry is I always either, you know, uh, advanced technology or advanced funding, one or the other, right?

But, but on the other hand, no VC wants to invest in a company that anyone can duplicate. So they do want high barriers to entry. But let me, let me mention something, and I'm not gonna get on my soapbox here, but unfortunately, at least here in our country, the idea of pointing out that this is a woman who did this is, is, is just not in style in some circles in this country.

And more than not in style, we're actually erasing women and other minorities from the history as contained on the web and maintained by this government. And that's a, that's a sin. That's a sin.

And, and it's a sin that our children are gonna pay the price, including the women out there and the minority people. I get that you don't wanna make it easier for just certain groups or whatever, but when you start erasing the history and don't call out the wins that people have, you, you are no better than, than than Hitler in 1932 in the Nazis. You don't do that.

You don't history that winners don't get to write the history on the web. There is only one history, and it's wrong that we're doing that in this country. And it, and it has to stop.

And if it means having alternate alternate websites and everything else, where we call out the truth of women and minorities who have done great things in this country, we need to do that. And I'll leave it at that. I wanna get Renee on Techstrong Women.

Wouldn't that be awesome? I know. It's like, how do I find her?

I gotta, I'm gonna reach out to her on LinkedIn. I dunno if that's gonna work, but now she's got some time. That was a cash offer.

5 billion cash offer. Well, but you don't know. How much did she give up, right?

I mean, Robert, you've been through this as a founder, right? 5. I mean, I'm gonna imagine if she's a typical founder and she went through three rounds or four rounds, she probably owns 10%, 12%, if She's, oh, yeah, yeah, that's terrible.

What is she gonna do with 650 million? I mean, poor thing. Hey, it's not, it's not like the Wiz guys who by my reckoning, each walked away with about 8 billion.

Hey, look, I, I really feel for them. Uh, they, they really, uh, uh, you know, how are they gonna survive? Exactly.

But, um, you know, look, it, it is the most important thing. It's, look, and, and Tracy will say this as well, uh, um, you know, you don't start companies to make money. It's actually the worst way to make money is started companies, you start companies because you're passionate about it, uh, because, uh, you feel strongly about it.

Uh, and, and speaking for myself, um, you know, it, it was, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, b******e surface at a, at a song, uh, where one of the lines was, um, you know, sun, the funny thing about regret is it's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done. And for me, I really didn't want to look back and regret not starting that company. It's never about the money.

Yeah, the money's nice, but, uh, it's really about, uh, changing the world and having an impact. And I think she has had an amazing impact and has dramatically changed the world. Um, you know, there, there is, um, you know, certainly, um, uh, just as A-A-C-E-O and a leader getting a company to this point and having an exit like this outstanding, and that is worth far more than the money.

Fair enough. Let's see what she, where, where it goes from here. All right, we're gonna take a break.

We're coming back to our last block for this lovely Monday morning, uh, open source, LLMs and cybersecurity. I don't know, oxymoron, maybe you're watching. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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And we're talking about Trend Micro, which made a move to open source. Its LLM that had built on top of the meta LLM, and they trained this specifically for cybersecurity purposes. And their argument is that, well, if everybody's gonna go bill an LLM for, uh, for a specific use case, we should just do one for cybersecurity that we can all share.

And they're arguing. It's a deep seek moment for cybersecurity. Alan, I know you've tracked this face for a long time, but what do you make of that anger?

Can you say Me too? I mean, I, I, I just like, all right, good, good for you, Chen. Michael.

I, I think what they're really trying to get at though, is that they're throwing in first. They'd like to see other cyber companies throw in. We'd like to see, maybe this is something like the Linux Foundation, OSSF should really be taking Charge Ofri, right?

Which is a, a cross industry single LLM for all things cyber, because having it just be the, in this case, trend Micro, or in another case, you know, Palo Alto or, or whatever, having it by individual companies is just balkanization, right? And, you know, my, uh, my LL m's bigger than your LLM, but if we could do an LLM cross industry managed by some sort of foundation, will it help? Maybe, maybe.

I mean, you know, it, it, it's, it's going to do, you know, the old saying quality in is quality out and, and not quality in is not quality out. Um, some people use a different word for not quality. But that being said, it it, you know, there's so much details in there, and quite frankly, I, you know, good for trend for doing this.

I applaud them. But this is really something that needs to be taken up by a more than a single vendor. It, it really screams for an OSSF kind of involvement.

Alright, Robert, do we need another Foundation? Come on. There's no shortage.

Well, alright. Ho, ho, ho. Hold on, Alan, like, before you start congratulating Trend Micro, uh, let, let's kind of get into that press release, uh, that they put out about this.

Um, first of all, this is not open source. Uh, the data's not open. Um, we, it is free, but free is in beer.

Uh, it is not free As in freedom. Uh, people cannot take this and improve this. Um, you cannot look at how it was built and seek to, uh, change it for your uses.

Uh, it's just free usage. This is shareware. Um, the other thing is, is that look at the licensing a call out explicitly in the press release.

You cannot use this, uh, if you're building a competitive offering to anything that Trend Micro offers. Um, this, this is that the, the Llama license that Meta came out with. Um, and, and so it is not open source.

Um, it is certainly free, uh, but if you really look at what it's doing, it's, they train this on trend micro, um, uh, data and, uh, things that they have offered. Like, okay, look for this on, on, on this compute instance. Look for these things at the network.

And so, um, it is Balkanized, uh, this is very specific to Trend Micro. And, um, honestly, I think that this is a strategy to do two things. One, uh, certainly yes, we're doing it too, but second, this is, oh, it identified lots of issues.

You need to fix it here, fix this with Trend micro products. Now, I do applaud them with that for a go to go to market strategy, brilliant, big fan. But if we're gonna start saying it's open source, um, uh, b******t, it is not.

Um, now certainly, you know, Alan, your, your point about a foundation and those sorts of things, um, right now, I don't think that there's an appetite for companies that would wanna fund this. They want to, they wanna have their walled garden, they want it balkanized. And, uh, certainly as, uh, for-profit organizations, they're going to do that.

I think the answer to this is for, uh, certainly Linux Foundation, other foundations to build their own, to do it out in the open, uh, to open source the data, to open source the model, uh, to give updates, and then have people be able to inspect this and show the world what a true open source L LLMs. Amen. Amen, brother.

I, I created all those points. So, but, but, but here's the trace. Let me just jump in and Marble, let me jump in a second.

I'm not gonna call it the hypocrisy of it, but let you worked at the Linux fan, and I'm not asking you to badmouth them or say anything outta school. No, but the, and Trace you're involved in them, they're not gonna do this project without someone kicking in some money to fund it. Where's that money coming from?

Hold, hold, hold on. But remember, all open source projects start from a developer scratching an itch. Eric Raymond, uh, cathedral on the Bazaar.

So somewhere, somewhere is a developer or group developers, uh, that is saying, Hey, I'm going to build this. Now, remember, I, I mentioned, uh, earlier in my, my Lego sorter. Um, I certainly intend to open source that, uh, because I've got a huge stack of Legos that I need to sort.

Um, and that is my itch. Uh, at some point, a group of developers, now, whether they're backed by for-profit companies or they're doing this on their own, are gonna build this. And, and I think two of the biggest successes in open source, um, we could talk about that, that itch to scratch.

Now, first, uh, lean, hey, I'm building, uh, a operating system for X 86. Yeah. Uh, it's gotta be free, not full, you know, huge big deal.

Uh, we've all read his first announcement, he just wanted to build it. Uh, another example of that is Kubernetes, um, Google saying, Hey, we have built Borg, um, and we don't wanna be in the, uh, container orchestration business. We wanna be in the AdWords business and all their other lines of business.

And so they open source that. Um, and so do you Think they regret it? Um, I know, I mean, from GKS, they're making plenty of money off of that.

And also the improvements that happened to Kubernetes that benefited Google Maps, Gmail, all this other stuff, uh, where they can make money off of that and not just selling Kubernetes, which they are with GKS, they're doing fine. Uh, I don't think they regret it at all. I think that they think that it's a, a master stroke.

And I think that the, uh, rest of the industry would agree, uh, very appreciative of, I think AWS is very happy with all the billions that they're making off EKS. Um, but you know, at the end of the day, this, this, these, these itches to scratch can come from an individual just doing it for intellectual, uh, uh, exercise or from companies seeking to, uh, take, uh, you know, kind of non-differentiated, non-differentiated technology. And, uh, having the whole industry work on that.

And then they could work on the higher order value add stuff. Um, this will happen. I think that's the most, that's the most Compelling thing about this conversation is that LLMs are rapidly becoming undifferentiated value.

I mean, the difference between the one that trend micro puts together and four other companies put together is marginal. So economically, it's time to just pile in together. Well, and, and that's the point I was making, Robert, I was not calling out Trend Micro for an attaboy, you know what I mean?

I think this is a me too thing. And yes, it's not truly open source, right? The, the LLM it, it's shareware.

It's a free to use, it's free as in beer as you said, but it doesn't give you the, the ability to make it better to, to add on to, to modify. But I think if, if, if Trend Micro's Heart is really in the right place here, the thing to do is put this LLM into a foundation and call on others to join in on it. Well, that's just, why don't we just say, wait, let me, I, why don't we just say, okay, first of all, I wanna just go just a couple of points here that were made.

Number one, there's both Alan and Robert are right to some level, um, open source projects, many of them, most of the big ones are now being driven and provided by big companies. I seldom go go into any of the Linux Foundations meetings where somebody has changed jobs and now the SIG or the open source project has to go through some kind of rigmarole to, you know, get somebody else involved because they're being paid to work on these open source projects. Literally, orus is probably one of the only ones that we have just driven this product by pure sheer open source contributors.

The, the problem with, um, trend Micro and this particular new release that they have, they're talking about is that it has no governance around it. And I do believe that, that if you're going to consume open source, you better consume some open source that has proper open source governance around it. It has a board, it has a community, and that's not what Trend Micro is doing.

So I agree with Ellen that it should be put into a proper open source, you know, foundation, whether it be Apache Eclipse or a new foundation that covers LLMs, right? Which however it works. And then the other problem I have with this is it's deceiving to say that it's a cybersecurity LLM because cybersecurity has so many sides to it, and they're talking mainly about, you know, what they do because it's based on their data.

So endpoint security, network security, they, they do a level of threat intelligence, but it's not related to, so the software supply chain, so to call it, you know, No, this is cloud security. It is cloud security, but there's cloud. But there, that's just one aspect of the cybersecurity world.

Yeah, But it's a start is all I'm saying is, guys, it's a start. It's not the, it's not meant to be the end, it's the beginning. It's a start, right?

But it, it needs to have a better name because it can be deceiving to think that this thing's gonna solve all cybersecurity problems, right? So I really feel like it should go into an open source community as well. Which one?

I don't know. But it should have proper governance around it, and it should, the, the, the licensing should be, uh, where you can actually use it and consume it and monetize it in a way that makes it, uh, makes open source what it is. All right, well hopefully this is the end at the beginning and we'll see where we go from here.

Right? Well, speaking of the end, this is the end of this Text Drug gang. I got the last word again.

Yes, you did. Tracy. Uh, hey everyone, just a reminder, you know, this is not the end of Text Drunk TV today though, because it's just the beginning, right?

Text Drunk Gang Heads Off, always leads off our full day of coverage on Text Drunk tv. So we still have probably two, three hours worth of great content for you to watch. Stay tuned if you're watching this on our Text Drunk TV Network, if you're just watching this on, on Demand on YouTube or Text Drunk TV or one of our websites to head over to Textron tv and, or log in every morning at nine 30 on Facebook or LinkedIn or, or YouTube or any of our sites, and you could catch the whole stream, or you could go to Text Drunk TV and just click on the individual, uh, segments that you're interested in.

Anyway, Robert, Tracy. Mike, thanks for joining today. Thank you for watching.

This is Alan Schult. This is another episode of Text Drunk Gang. We're outta here.