Thank you for making the trip from all the corners of the globe to come to this occasion in this particular year. I cannot believe that it's been 20 years. When folks started talking about this at the start of the year, it just didn't feel real because for me the beginning of Ubuntu was way back, so I was able to put it out of my mind and say okay, let's wait till October. But now here we are, and it really has been 20 years of Ubuntu. I want to start by expressing such gratitude and appreciation for all of the people here and everywhere over many years who in so many different ways have made this project a joy and an unexpected adventure through time, through software, through communities, through countries, through culinary delights. Thank you to all of you who are at the summit or watching on video. If you have in any small way been part of making Ubuntu what it is today, I want to say thank you.
It's a real pleasure for me to be here in the Hague. We had a much smaller event here in the Hague in 2016, and I got to discover all these interesting places, museums, institutes where great things have happened and great things have been celebrated. Particularly in culture and art, this city is extraordinarily rich, and I hope all of you will get an opportunity to dip into parts of that that you find interesting. Of all of that, the single thing that I most enjoyed was a tiny little museum dedicated to M. C. Escher. Maybe you recognize his work. There's this amazing thing that happens between math and art and perception and reality that is extraordinary and unique in the world. There is a tiny place here in the city which has an incredible collection of his work, and I really encourage you to go see it. By the end of the summit, you'll feel like a fish out of water or a duck going for a swim, but I hope you have a great time and that the experiences are full of unexpected pleasures.
Twenty years ago, we had just become Ubuntu. Before that, we were no name yet. That was back in the days when it was just an idea. We struggled, the 30 to 40 of us who were coming together mostly from the Debian community, to figure out what we wanted to call ourselves. There is this beautiful word from African tradition, Ubuntu, and that word is very hard to describe. It's often translated as 'I am because of who we are.' To me, that captured so clearly what open source is about, what it means to be part of something that is much bigger, where you may never even know the impact that you're having or the people who are benefiting from something, and you may never even know the people from whom you are benefiting. That spirit of open source is beautifully captured for me by the word Ubuntu, so that's ultimately why we chose it.
You could look at it a different way: the measure of your success and the measure of my success is their success, and it doesn't matter who they are. That's the beautiful thing about open source and about Ubuntu. Our contribution to open source is not just the obvious thing that we contribute, but it's the amplification of all of the contributions to open source that people find easier to get, can build on more easily, or are encouraged to explore and enjoy because we brought a different take to it.
There is a community that builds something. Often the temptation is to say that's what it's all about, this feeling of being part of something. But for me, the other half of this is all of the people doing brilliant things who don't identify as Ubuntu – innovators who do things we wouldn't even know how to try, how to do. I think about silicon companies, people working at entirely different kinds of abstraction, with entirely different constraints and challenges, doing kinds of innovation that to me are completely mysterious. Yet by partnering with them and bringing open source to their silicon, we unlock the future faster together. They bring us great big piles of open source to do things on brand new silicon faster, sooner, because of who they are. I think of all the people who make devices, boxes, personal boxes, server boxes, data center boxes, IoT boxes – bring open source to those boxes and magic happens. Conversely, bring those boxes to open source and magic happens. Our impact is amplified by the partnership we have with the people who build the actual systems that we all use. Think about public cloud, this extraordinary new kind of compute, this seemingly endless compute capability that enables people to do incredible science in a day they might have waited 10 years to do, or entirely new kinds of business to be built that we never would have dreamed of, because of public cloud, because of open source. Then I think of upstreams, ISPs, the developers, people doing things that we're not going to see for another three or five years, people who are drawing from the well of open source and pouring their own talent, their own ideas into that well, whether as code under an open license or as inspiration for code under an open license. We cannot hope to do what they do, but we can enable them to reach their audiences faster and better. We can enable them to ship software with more confidence, immediately and in the long term, and they will contribute new ideas, new things to us.
When it got started, those of my sisters who had brand new laptops had one power running at about that. Brand new laptops, and yet today you can run that on a coin cell. It's incredible. I believe the next 20 years will be equally transformative in terms of what people the ambition that people have to create things we can't even dream about today. They will do it because of open source and on open source. It is a great privilege for me to be working right in the middle of all that, living a little bit vicariously through stories of what people do with open source, the crazy challenges they face, and the ways in which open source enables them to dream those dreams.
Canonical didn't really exist for a long time; it was only the community. One of the interesting things has been to figure out how we could find a place and a relationship between company and community that would amplify the impact of both. In discussion with the community council this week, we were talking about that relationship, and it really reminded me that in the founding of Ubuntu there was this idea that we already had exceptional communities that were resiliently and resolutely curious – the Debian community is pretty extraordinary – and we already had companies that were exceptional, focused on open source, like Red Hat and SUSE, who had blazed that trail. Credit to them for doing that. We needed to find a new space, a way of working that would be genuinely different and genuinely new. There have been many times in our history when people have said, why don't you just do this because that's what everybody does, and I would say, because they've already done it. We don't add anything if we don't think differently about that relationship. Relationships are difficult. All relationships can be difficult. People never want exactly the same thing, people never see the world exactly the same way because they have different experiences. I think it's a real credit to everybody concerned that we have found this balance. It brings great joy to see people who work for Canonical and people who do not work for Canonical having an intellectual and emotional discussion about technology without necessarily knowing or caring whether the other person has an agenda beyond solving the problem. I think it's a credit to all concerned that largely that's what we see.
This is our new London office at Canonical. I was delighted that the very first event held there was the Ubuntu community competition, with people from a wide range of companies and community interests, from the kernel all the way up, hashing things out, bragging a little, pushing a little, just like they like it. Innovation happens everywhere. There is so much computing, so much diversity in the kinds of computing – public cloud, data centers, edge clouds, tiny little things, workstations. None of us can know the whole of it, but I would ask us all to try to find what we have in common. You may be across the table from someone trying to get something done on a mainframe, or a supercomputer, or a personal computer desktop. You all have something in common. Wherever innovation happens, we want to support that innovation, accelerate that innovation, enable that innovation. Not just in computing, but wherever in space too. This is our new Beijing office, which is very empty. I hope we can get members of the open source community who are equally passionate about everything from AI to health to whatever they might be passionate about, to broaden our community, keep it an open community, and make sure that the benefits of open source reach every corner of the globe.
We are different. We want different things. It's a great joy for me to see the leaders who are driven and passionate and aware of details from the lowest level in the kernel all the way up to the highest level in terms of user experience or domains which I'll never have any deep understanding of. To see those leaders able to craft something that expresses their vision, enables them to push into their audience with the muscles of the whole Ubuntu Community, without necessarily distracting all of us from the things we care about. I want to thank everybody who showed up and said 'I want to take Ubuntu in a different direction, but I will work together and make that a plus.' That is very different, definitely not the easy way to do it, neither technically nor socially. But in the long run, that is the way.
In the last two years, we very carefully and deliberately been enabling people to think about Ubuntu as an enterprise platform, as a mission-critical platform. That was always going to be a very sensitive, delicate question. How are we going to do that? What are we going to take away? What are we going to lose if that happens? Inside Canonical, in the Ubuntu community, in the wider audience, I think others felt we needed to be very careful not to spoil something that we all believe in. I want to thank everybody who played a hand in shaping our thinking in how to do that. The reason I think this is important in the community is because whatever your vision, whatever your audience, I want you to feel like you can be proud of what you bring to Canonical, to Ubuntu. There is no reason for a community project to aspire to deliver to that standard, and because we've done this the way we have, I really believe it's possible. I'd like to go further. I'd like people who are open source innovators, or innovators on open source, to feel that because we've done this this way, even if they have nothing to do with Ubuntu, even if they have no interest in identifying with Ubuntu, if it's helpful for them, it makes it easy for them to be. I'm sure we have a whole bunch more to do, but I wanted to share that that's the spirit in which we're doing it.
This is the question. This is the question I ask that we ask: What would be amazing? Everything's difficult, everything's complicated, and being different is controversial. But in the end, to do something that you feel is really amazing is worth a little bit of controversy, a little bit of sweat, some blood, some tears. So I hope whatever it is that you came here to do, whatever story you came here to tell, I hope that people are going to come up to you and say 'That was amazing,' and I hope that you go home thinking 'I'm going to make it even more amazing because of someone I met, something I heard, something I saw, something that came to me while I was staring at M. C. Escher.' On that note, welcome. I hope you have a great weekend. I'm super excited to see at least one track at a time of everything you have to say. Thank you for being here.
