KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2025 | Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation & Jonathan Bryce, OpenInfra Foundation

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Jim Zemlin

Executive Director

Linux Foundation

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, Cloud & Infrastructure

The Linux Foundation

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play_circle_outline Merger of Linux Foundation and OpenInfra Foundation announced

play_circle_outline OpenStack's latest release and adoption in various industries

play_circle_outline Open source community growth and impact discussed by Jim Zemlin

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing AI Accessibility and Training Costs Through Open Source Technology

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Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation & Jonathan Bryce, OpenInfra Foundation

Jim Zemlin

Executive Director Linux Foundation

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, Cloud & Infrastructure The Linux Foundation

In this engaging session, Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, and Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, discuss the ongoing collaboration between their organizations. This conversation, recorded at KubeCon EU 2025, provides insights into the merger process and its significance for the open-source community.

Zemlin of The Linux Foundation and Bryce of OpenInfra Foundation join Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay on theCUBE's KubeCon EU 2025 live stream. The video explores the strategic merger of OpenInfra int... Read more

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What is the estimated number of people in attendance at the event mentioned in the text? add

What organizations are merging together and moving one into the other? add

What is the update on OpenStack's latest release and usage statistics? add

What has been the unexpected impact of open source and the growth of the organization? add

What potential impact does open source have on AI accessibility and market growth in the upcoming year? add

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Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation & Jonathan Bryce, OpenInfra Foundation

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Savannah Peterson

>> A good afternoon, open source community, and welcome back to London, England. We are here coming to the end of our first day of three days of coverage at KubeCon CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, telling all the coolest stories in the space with Rob Strechay. Rob, I'm really pumped about the next guest. What about you?

Rob Strechay

>> I am very excited, because it takes me back a little bit to some stuff I worked on quite a while ago, and it really talks to the community and the big tent nature of CNCF and the Linux Foundation in general, and where open Source is going

Savannah Peterson

>> And who better to tell us about that than Jim Zemlin and Jonathan Bryce. Thank you both for taking the time to come hang out with us today. Jim, I'm going to open with you. This is essentially your show. Do you know every single person here?

Jim Zemlin

>> I wish I knew every single person here. I used to know most of the Linux kernel developers' names. I know a lot of the Kubernetes maintainers, but it's gotten so big that I can't possibly know them all.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know, it's really packing in. Do you have any idea how many folks are here today? Actually, you're a perfect person to ask.

Jim Zemlin

>> I think we have about 14,000 people here.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Jim Zemlin

>> Yeah, new record.

Rob Strechay

>> Nice.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was just going to say, oh my gosh, that is so cool. You've got to have a lot of friends here too, Jonathan.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, it's been really awesome to see kind of the progression of technology and with that the people as they work on things like OpenStack and then Kubernetes and now a lot of folks who are getting into various open source AI projects. And people, especially developers, always love to work on what's new and hot.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and we are certainly at the epicenter of that right now. So we've got the Linux Foundation and OpenInfra here on the stage. Historically, two separate organizations, however, there's a merge happening. Tell me a little bit about that, Jonathan.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, we just recently had both boards from both organizations vote to join forces, and we will be moving the OpenInfra Foundation into the Linux Foundation, in the way that CNCF operates, or PyTorch Foundation or some of these other groups. I'm really excited about it. We have a great community, we have a really strong staff on our foundation, but I think that when we combine these teams together, we're going to be able to do so much more for our projects, and really meet the moment with what open source needs right now.

Savannah Peterson

>> And open source is definitely having a moment. What does this mean for you and the team, Jim? Are you super excited to welcome the OpenInfra family?

Jim Zemlin

>> Yeah, Jonathan and I have for years been, every sort of around Christmastime, we get together for an annual dinner just to commiserate as open source nonprofit leaders. And through those conversations we started talking about some of the bigger challenges that open source is having now that it is so mainstream. The Linux Foundation now is home to Linux, RISC-V, PyTorch, CNCF, now OpenInfra, a huge amount of critical building blocks for all modern tech. And now that it's become so mainstream, we're getting the attention of regulators, we're getting the attention of cyber criminals, we're getting the attention of legal litigants around patent or copyright claims.

Savannah Peterson

>> Everyone's favorite people that you just listed there.

Jim Zemlin

>> Exactly, now that we're so popular. And with that comes a need for more resources to take on these challenges to work with regulators so that policy that comes out, hopefully making software more secure, safer, isn't something that puts an undue burden on open source communities. That we have legal defense frameworks, that we have ways to help improve the cybersecurity of each of our projects. And just to bring together the talent, and I'm speaking selfishly here, the OpenInfra Foundation isn't just about the technology itself, it's people like Jonathan who we need to work together with to solve these bigger problems. And I for one, am very grateful to have more hands on deck at the foundation because his team is super talented.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean I think you look at it and there's the portfolio is very complimentary. I mean, like I was talking before-

Savannah Peterson

>> Indeed....

Rob Strechay

>> we got on, OpenStack is something that I worked on a long time ago, it feels like decade, it was over a decade ago. And it was one of these things that a lot of the stuff that Kubernetes went to solve and CNCF and stuff like the bare metal aspects of it and other things, really grew out of some of the learnings that came from OpenStack. And OpenStack really got put... But you're more than just OpenStack. You have a whole number of different projects that are in there you're bringing with you.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, so OpenStack is still our biggest project and community and we actually 11 minutes ago just dropped our 31st release.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations.

Rob Strechay

>> Nice.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Thank you, yeah. Epoxy.

Savannah Peterson

>> You heard it here first, CUBE audience. Yeah.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah. OpenStack continues to crank 45 million cores in production of compute-

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow....

Jonathan Bryce

>> deployed into OpenStack clouds around the world, tens of thousands of them. Nine of the top 10 telcos are running it, every bank in France is running it, just on and on. So, it's been awesome to see the continued adoption and growth there, but we also have added other projects that really fit in our community. Kata Containers is a runtime environment that lets you isolate a container, that's good for security. It's also good as a way to get direct access to high performance hardware. So Ali Cloud, for instance, has a GPU service that uses Kata Containers to give GPUs to their customers in a multi-tenant way. And what I think is, you mentioned this kind of complimentary nature. When I look at our communities around the world, when they throw local events, a lot of times those events are not just an OpenStack event. They have OpenStack, they have Kubernetes, they have Ceph, because that's what they do in their job. They go in, they operate a data center, and they need all of these different open source projects and they are making them work together. So to me, bringing these foundations together in some ways is a reflection of how our communities operate in their day-to-day lives, and really, getting us more aligned with the world at large from a foundation organization perspective as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> What's the community response been like with the merging happening here? Is everyone excited? I mean, I would think so, stronger together.

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, and I think that the opportunities to collaborate closer, to get more involved in events across these projects, people love that, because the reason that so many people love open source is because you come here and you have 14,000 people who all have the same problems from, I don't know how many countries are in attendance, but probably close to 100. And that's kind of a unique way to work.

Savannah Peterson

>> .

Jonathan Bryce

>> It's definitely not what you do if you just go to a job in an office and sit there every day. You're not kind of getting exposed to this type of environment with so much opportunity to meet people, learn, grow. Just this dynamic nature of open source is really special.

Savannah Peterson

>> And the diversity of folks who contribute to projects. I mean, you mentioned 100 countries. That allows you to create solutions that really are globally mindful in everything that you're doing. Jim, you hit on this a little bit earlier of what a critical time it is for open source right now. Curious to hear if you anticipated this moment happening or if you're riding the wave along with the rest of us a little bit.

Jim Zemlin

>> I'd like to take some credit for it, but I really can't. Certainly, the organization has grown beyond what I thought it would, but more importantly, open source has become much more impactful than I ever thought it would. I tell a story about how on my first date with my now wife, who went to Harvard Business School, is a very successful tech exec. She asked me what I did for a living and I said, "Oh, I work in this non-profit." This was, I think in 2004. "It's open source, we give everything away for free." The look of disappointment was palpable, and but she still married me. But just yesterday, in fact, I probably still have some of the powder on from this speech as I left Intel's Vision conference where I was speaking to come here. There was a huge sign in this massive screen that advertised me as a visionary. And my wife was so proud, and that alone has made it all worth it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Full circle moment. 21 years later-

Jim Zemlin

>> Exactly....

Savannah Peterson

>> you feel that affirmation.

Jim Zemlin

>> Exactly. But I think the important thing to consider over my 20 years here, Linus Storvalds, who works at the Linux Foundation, that 30 years in open source or more, is how special it is to be a part of this community where people get to work with a community they love, on technology they love, get paid pretty darn well to do that, and have a truly positive impact on the industry and the world. That's pretty rarefied air, and I think it's the combination of all of those things, the sort of intrinsic motivation of being a part of something bigger than yourself.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Jim Zemlin

>> Exploring new technology and creativity and sort of mastering your craft, combined with the financial rewards that open source creates, wholesale, multi-billion dollar industries. Harvard Business School recently did a study estimating the demand side value of open source code at $9 trillion.

Savannah Peterson

>> Whoa, wow.

Jim Zemlin

>> It's amazing how far we've come, and it's just been an honor to be a part of that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Did you share that with your wife immediately when it came out as well, for that further affirmation?

Jim Zemlin

>> I did, and then she said, "You know, now that you've done this non-profit work, you should go get a job as a tech CEO somewhere." I think I am a tech CEO.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think the 14,000 people here would agree with you on that one.

Jim Zemlin

>> I think I get some credit, there's something. But it's funny because it's really hard for me to talk about open source and try and take credit for the Linux Foundation or organization like ours for all this great work, because we always kind of consider ourselves the supporting cast, right? We're here to provide legal protection, we're here to provide the development tooling. We're here to help the people who really make it happen, which are the developers and maintainers of Kubernetes and OpenStack and PyTorch and all of these incredible technologies that we depend on every day.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, it would also seem that its timing would be very good when you look at the challenges that the market has seen with virtualization at the server level and how you have KubeVirt coming in and really shaking up things from VMs on Kubernetes. You have a lot of that stuff and a lot of that really bare metal type stuff in OpenStack already. And like you were saying, the telcos, because being able to do network functions, virtualization was one of the key things that I saw come out of OpenStack back in the day. I can still remember being in Vancouver, which is probably one of the best locations for that OpenStack conference where you're looking over the bay and it's just beautiful. But do you see this as kind of one of those moments where it made a lot of sense to bring it together because of all the stuff outside of open source as well?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Yeah, I think everything outside of open source is also very, very related to open source, it's all driving open source. If you look at VMware for instance, has gone through a whole set of licensing changes, and that's created a lot of uncertainty in the market. And so folks are like, okay, how can I bring certainty back to my tech strategy here? Well, if you go to an open source community, you have an ecosystem that gives you choice, that gives you options. This has been something where within the OpenStack community, we've seen a ton of adoption around this. Geico actually did a case study about a migration that they did around this, but I think if you look beyond just those kinds of things, the big macro driver right now is obviously AI, and this is a multi-trillion dollar investment in infrastructure. It's going into data centers, it's going into GPUs, it's going into networks, and we need software that can manage all of this. In that release that we just had today with Epoxy, our OpenStack release, one of the new features in there is support for different kinds of PCI pass through so you can get maximum performance from the latest GPUs. These things don't exist in vacuums. Just because a new piece of super high performance proprietary hardware comes out, it doesn't mean that a Kubernetes developer can use it today. We have to keep evolving our open source software so that it supports all of those advancements above, below, beside us, whatever it is. And that's what I think continues to really drive the momentum and the activity that we see in these communities. Everything that's happening around us is actually very impactful and just pushes the open source to keep moving forward and improving.

Savannah Peterson

>> Keep moving forward, improving, and also expanding the reach. I mean, you mentioned a little bit of an underdog 21 years ago when you were initially pitching this, but a totally different ball game now, $9 trillion in value is no joke. Since you both get to see a lot of what's going on in open source, period, and what the community is up to, what do you hope to be able to say when we're hanging out in Amsterdam next year, for example, at the next KubeCon that you can't yet say today?

Jim Zemlin

>> I think what we'll see next year is, right now open source is having a bit of an AI moment because of DeepSeek.

Savannah Peterson

>> Correct.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Jim Zemlin

>> Right? Here this open source model comes out, trained at a fraction of the cost of a proprietary model. Just yesterday, Sam Altman announced they're going to have an open source model again now. And what's happening is, open source is making AI even more accessible. More models in more hands, means a bigger market for everyone. And I think what's going to happen is open source is going to do what it does best. It's going to lower the cost of training models, which was prohibitive before, and it's going to shift to inference. And where you use a lot of inference in AI workloads is with AI applications, and that's what everyone cares about, right? A self-driving car, a service chatbot, whatever. What open source and what I want to talk about next year is, that from the hardware to the orchestration software above that hardware, to the data pipelines to build an LM to the LLM all the way up to the application, everything below the application will have lots of different choices of open source alternatives. It'll open up lots of hardware performance improvements, lots of hardware choice, and we're going to see all sorts of interesting applications built, AI applications built on top of that open source. I hope that's what we'll be talking about next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, we certainly will have you back on to talk about that, that's for sure. I can't wait to see what happens. Go ahead, Jonathan. What about you?

Jonathan Bryce

>> Well, he stole most of my thoughts there, but I think the-

Jim Zemlin

>> Great minds.

Savannah Peterson

>> No wonder you're working on the same team.

Jonathan Bryce

>> To kind of dive onto the technology piece a little bit. Open source lowers the cost of experimentation, it also is ruthless in terms of what survives. Open source projects don't generally have multiple years of runway from an investment to kind of sit there and work and pivot. They come out and it's such a competitive space that if project one is not solving the need in the right way, and project two is, project one goes away. And so it's like a very, very rapid competitive space right now. I think what we'll see in a year is that that stack that the Jim is talking about, there'll be choices, but we'll also start to see patterns emerge. And when you see those patterns emerge from open source, that's when you get that Cambrian explosion of applications. Like the lamp stack is what made the internet, the internet. Once we figured out how to put a database and some programming together and run it reliably on Linux servers, we had millions and millions of applications. And then WordPress came along and we had tens of millions of applications. So I think we're way, way, way early in this right now. I think next year we'll start to see the initial patterns, and that's just going to unlock so much activity in the higher layers.

Jim Zemlin

>> Yeah. Well, one early indicator of that that I'd like to pitch is a project we have called the Open Platform for Enterprise AI. So this is a set, think of it as like the Node.js for AI, so Node.js to web applications, what OPEA, enterprise platform for AI is, to AI applications. It's a framework that comes with all the tools you need to deploy RAG applications, and blueprints for enterprise chatbots in a variety of different workloads. I think we'll start to see some consolidation in these type of frameworks. And then all sorts of interesting tools and plugins built around them, different components and building blocks, and that will unleash a lot of new AI applications because those building blocks will all be there.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, and I mean, you're even seeing people like NVIDIA, where they acquired Run:ai, and Run:ai's scheduler getting open sourced-

Jim Zemlin

>> Exactly....

Rob Strechay

>> and things like that. And I think open, generally speaking, wins. I mean, we're big proponents of open source.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, we are.

Jim Zemlin

>> Sam Altman just gave us a huge endorsement yesterday.

Rob Strechay

>> Exactly. So I think that that is true. I mean, you have the Llamas, you have all of that stuff as well that's out there, and I think it's really interesting where this is going to go over the next year.

Jim Zemlin

>> Mark my words, when we talk next year, there will be more Llamas, more DeepSeeks, that we will be blown away at how cost-effective the training was and how performant these models are. And they will be freely available to anyone.

Rob Strechay

>> Agreed.

Savannah Peterson

>> Love to hear it, couldn't agree with you more. Jim, Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time today. This has been a super fun conversation. Congratulations on the merging and continued collaboration and getting to hang out with your 14,000 best friends here in Europe. Rob, always a pleasure sharing the desk with you, and thank all of you for tuning in. We're here in London, England at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.