Is Open Source The Answer To Data Privacy And Flexibility?

Jeffro (00:01.962)
Today on Digital Dominance, I’m joined by David Young, a true pioneer in cloud computing and open source technology. David helped launch Joints, the company that essentially invented cloud computing as we know it, introducing virtual machines over the internet, storage as a service, and even playing a role in the creation of Node.js, which is now one of the most widely used development tools on the web. These days, David is focused on helping businesses harness the power of open source software through his current company, Federated Computer.

So in this episode, we’ll be diving into how open source solutions give service based businesses a privacy edge and the kind of flexibility you just don’t get from big SaaS platforms. David, welcome to the show.

David Young (00:40.054)
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeffro (00:42.803)
Yeah, definitely. I’m excited for our conversation because I think for most non-technical folks, I would venture to guess that most of them encountered the term open source here and there, but they don’t think too much of it. You know, they might know that WordPress is open source, but that’s probably the extent of it. So from your perspective, let’s start with why should everyday business owners care about open source software?

David Young (01:05.07)
Well, thanks for the question. You know, the idea of open source is oftentimes a puzzle to people because first of all, they don’t know what source means. They kind of know what open means, but open source is simply the way that software is developed. in this case, it’s developed in a community.

Jeffro (02:27.28)
Yeah. Sounds good to me.

David Young (02:52.057)
You know, that sounds very good. That sounds very sort of loving and something we might want to be a part of. But the fact is that today, almost everything we use on the internet is built on top of open source. So if you go to a website, it’s likely using an open source web server, a database, all these sorts of things. And what developers do is they put all this stuff together to sort of make that website.

The idea of open source goes far beyond that. So if you’re using a Mac OS computer today, it’s built on a top of a lot of open source that yes, they do sort of the decoration, but the guts of the computer is open source. If you’re using an Android phone, that’s all open source. so, you know, open source is everywhere. And what my company, federated computer does is we’ve taken some of the best open source software that people would want to use.

and made it very easy to use it. So instead of needing to use something like Google Workplace, you can use an open source alternative from Federated Computer and you get the same sort of ease of use, backups, security, and everything that you’d get from Google Workplace, but instead you’re using open source. The impact for customers and for users is really significant. The typical business today spends anywhere between three to $400

per month per user on software. And when they switch from using proprietary software like Zoom or Slack or something like Google Workplace and move to open source, they can drive those costs down very significantly. an entire business on Federated Computer, the fees for them per month is $120 per month. So that’s a really significant change in cost.

But then you also get the benefits of open source and one of those is privacy. So you’re not, your data isn’t being used by these big proprietary companies for advertising networks or for training their AI. And then the thing that I hope we really get to talk about is the flexibility that comes from open source. When you use open source tools, it’s kind of like screwdrivers or hammers in your toolbox. No one owns those things. They’re standards. And because they’re standards,

David Young (05:13.677)
the interchangeable and the same is true for open source software. When you do adopt open source, you get the flexibility. So maybe if you’re a service business, you can start to use these software tools to differentiate your business and sort of get in there and say, how do I use these tools to sort of showcase the process within my business or other sorts of offerings that I want to highlight in my business that are sometimes difficult to do with proprietary solutions.

Jeffro (05:42.213)
Okay, well that makes sense and we’re going to get to flexibility. But before that, I want to jump on something you mentioned. There are standards that you guys can conform to so that stuff can interoperate. I think everybody obviously understands that, it’s cheaper to use open source. You mentioned that. But what about the compatibility question? Okay, well if everybody else in the world has Zoom and I’m like, hey, can you use my version? How is that going to work and is that going to create a lot of friction? So if you could talk about that, that would be helpful.

David Young (07:09.485)
Yeah, so the offering that we have at Federated Computer is a package called Jitsi. So that’s the open source sort of video conferencing software. Jitsi is supported by a lot of companies. In fact, Google Meet is based on Jitsi. Brave Browser, if you’ve used Brave Talk, that’s based on Jitsi. A lot of people base on Jitsi. So I would actually argue that the compatibility is really

really strong for many open source tools. You know, the case of Zoom is one that we need to talk about. Yes, it’s widely used, but it’s really, really expensive and it’s really hard to sort of argue that you get the benefit of Zoom. You know, there is a network effect and everyone’s using Zoom. But in fact, if you have the sort of courage to use an open source tool, an alternative, you get the benefits of lower price.

You’re not struggling with the fact that zoom announced last summer that they’re going to use all of our conversations on zoom for the purpose of training the AI. You know, there’s a principle that I like to remember when it comes to software and buying software. If it’s centralized, you know, you’re the product. Even if you’re paying for it, you’re the product. If it’s decentralized, you can’t be the product. So

You know, if you’re comfortable with your information and your data being used, look at the terms of service. More often than not, it’s being used for other purposes. And so the opportunities that you get with open source is to be able to have data sovereignty. You’re not being farmed for your data, for your attention. And as you said, it’s just cheaper and more flexible.

Jeffro (08:58.927)
Yeah, and so really businesses are giving up control of their data many times without even realizing that that’s what’s happening just because, okay, this is the option, so that’s what we signed up for. They never even consider that data aspect of it.

David Young (09:10.915)
Yeah, and so, you know, let’s take another concrete example with Zoom. Let’s say you develop this amazing customer service app and you want to add video conferencing to that. Well, that’s going to be a tough thing to do with Zoom because Zoom is a closed garden. You do what Zoom allows you to do. But if you’re using Jitsi, an open source video conferencing app, you get to decide how you want to use Jitsi. You can put that into your…

customer service app and you don’t need someone’s permission. It comes back to this idea where now you’re using the software tools to differentiate and expand and promote your business rather than saying, well, I have to conform my business to what Zoom says, to what Slack says, to what these other companies say.

Jeffro (10:01.435)
So let’s keep going down this privacy and data rabbit hole a little bit. Because obviously there’s some industries that are not regulated, they don’t handle sensitive data, so they might be like, eh, I don’t really care. But there’s always going to be things like health clinics and things that need to be HIPAA compliant or safeguard personal information. talk about why does this matter, even if they’re not highly regulated? Because I think.

I think it’s easy for people to brush it under the rug and just assume like, yeah, it’s not a big deal.

David Young (10:35.587)
Well, it’s interesting when people are given the opportunity to have data privacy, they take it. They instinctively understand that their data is used against them. And this is not a question of some sort of illegal activity where you and I, Jeff Rowe, are having a conversation about committing a crime. Maybe the fact that I’m having a conversation with you is something that’s interesting to someone says, we’ve noticed that most people

that have a conversation with Jeffro have bad habits when it comes to health. So the insurance company, they buy this information from your application provider and they use this information, big data, to sort of make insurance decisions, to make loan decisions. These are things that are happening today. They’re not, I don’t have at my hand links for people, but they should do their research. This is what people are doing and this is a very

profitable part of many SaaS businesses is selling this data so it can be used to sort of build aggregate profiles and not just a personal information, anywhere you we if I’m a data person I want to know Everywhere you are in all the activities the more I know about you the better the better profile I could build about you whether it’s for advertising or any other business so I think companies sort of need to wake up to this and understand that

you know, data privacy is really a important part of successful business. The second thing though, is in the past, it’s been a real pain in the ass to sort of adopt open source. And so what we’re trying to do at federated and there are others that are doing this is to make it very easy for people to adopt open source in the same way that when I was at joint. You know, when I found a joint back in the day, if you were starting a new web business,

You went and bought a very expensive Oracle database. You went and had to rack and stack servers. And what we did is we took open source and made that cheaper, more data privacy, data sovereignty, and more flexible. And that’s the cloud. The cloud before the cloud, we sort of take the cloud as a point of, it’s always been there. It hasn’t always been there. used to be very difficult. So we’re trying to do the same thing when it comes to,

David Young (13:00.633)
customer SaaS, SaaS software that we’re consuming is make it easy for customers to adopt these open source solutions. And we think that’s really, really beneficial for business.

Jeffro (13:13.229)
Yeah, and that makes sense. And I do want to talk more about the flexibility there because I think another question people have is, hey, I’m not technical. Do I need to hire a developer to make use of these open source tools in these flexible ways? are there ways I can adopt these solutions without a huge technical learning curve?

David Young (13:30.647)
You can absolutely adopt them without a huge technical learning curve. And in fact, the thousands of customers that we have at Federated, this has been their shared experience. You know, it is difficult to switch. know, so this would be like switching from Windows to Macintosh. It’s a different experience. But once you sort of escape from say Windows to another platform, once you escape from proprietary software to open source software,

you begin to see the sort of benefits. Now you can go deep, you can go as deep as you want. And that’s what, that’s the flexibility topic we’re going to get to. But you know, the switching costs are pretty minimal. They’re pretty easy. And by the way, you don’t have to switch everything at once. You know, maybe you do, you know, we have customers where they switch from Jira to say Plane, which is our project management software, or they switch from Zendesk, which is

really expensive to FreeScout, which is our ticket management system. Everything else stays the same. They begin to move bit by bit over to open source. But as they get comfortable, they see, wow, we can save a lot of money. We can begin to sort of tie in our e-commerce system with our CRM, with our ticket management system in ways that were not possible before. Because when you use proprietary software, you’re sort of sitting there.

waiting and see, I wonder what the kitchen’s gonna bring out to the table, if you know what I mean. But with open source, you get to be the cook. And especially for entrepreneurs, that’s such a powerful statement when we can use our tools in the way we want to.

Jeffro (15:14.008)
I agree. got one more question because you talked about how it can be easy to switch. You can switch in pieces and stuff, but there’s still going to be a fear about open source software. What if it stops getting supported, right? If the developers just get too busy or stop caring about this when they find a new platform. Now I’ve switched everything over. I’m entrenched and I’m left holding the bag of who’s going to actually help me with this stuff.

David Young (15:38.327)
Yeah. You mean like Google feed reader or any number of other Google products that have been, you know, we all adopted and then they, they were dropped. mean, this is a, this is a real problem. You’re there’s no question. This is a real problem. you know, one of the missions of federated sort of do the right curation. Most of the, most of the solutions that we are offering to customers today have hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of users worldwide.

Jeffro (15:41.314)
Yeah

Jeffro (15:47.04)
Yes, those ones.

David Young (16:07.201)
not necessarily through Federated, but through the whole community. So these are projects like Nextcloud and Jitsi and Basero that have very wide adoption. And so while I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t look into the future and the future, who knows what the future is. Maybe in 25 years, we all just have a neuro link in our brain and we don’t even use software. We just sort of enjoy our vacation at the beach, who knows? But today I think there’s…

sort of a high degree of confidence that the solutions we’re offering your customers are going to be around for the long term.

Jeffro (16:43.617)
That makes sense. there any other big misconceptions that business owners might have about going open source?

David Young (16:49.795)
Well, we sometimes get the question about security. And again, this is one of those things where you sort of perceive like, wow, I really want to be able to take a product from Microsoft. And then I have Microsoft standing behind the product. But in fact, if you look at the data, open source projects have had far fewer security breaches than proprietary products. And the reason that is, is because the source code

the way that the product work is entirely transparent and out there for the whole public to see. So these products tend to get the fixes quicker, the vulnerabilities are identified quicker. And in fact, Microsoft to pick on them have had a lot of security breaches. We really have no idea what’s going on with this software, including our whole networks of hospitals were not able to process patients.

for weeks because they were running Microsoft products. So I think open source sort of takes you away from some weird thing that you’re dependent upon the vendor to support and to provide all the security to something where you’re now moving into a position where the community is going to support it. And if that community is big enough, that’s your prior question, and active enough, then you can be very, very confident you’re gonna be safe and your data is gonna be safe.

Jeffro (18:14.526)
You’re relying on the goodness of humanity and the developers out there to help make sure that this baby they’ve created is going to stay healthy and strong.

David Young (18:23.779)
That’s right. That’s right.

Jeffro (18:25.866)
So now with some of your platforms over the years, you’ve helped some of the big companies that we know of, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook’s DevTools. How do some of those lessons that you’ve had through that apply to these smaller service-based businesses that we’re talking about today?

David Young (18:41.763)
Yeah. So as you say, you know, at joint, we were very fortunate to be the first public cloud. We invented a lot of interesting technology at joint as we were sort of working out what the cloud is and what it should be for customers. and we had companies like Twitter start on us, the Facebook developer program, Tumblr, you know, many, many customers at the end of the day, what I learned there is that actually when you’re building a product for customers,

scale happens, but most of your customers are going to be operating in a scale that’s pretty small. And so what we’ve learned and what we really pay attention to is how do we deal with every customer’s experience and their outcomes so that they all are positive? In other words, we’re not sort of saying, well, this customer we really have to pay attention to and this other customer, not so much. And we do that by sort of a rigorous attention to

turning our service into a product. And by a product means scalable, repeatable, so that every customer gets the same great experience, the same great uptime, the same sort of ability to sort of adopt and get the success from Federated Computer Products as any customer, or small, would get from our products.

Jeffro (20:03.158)
That makes sense. And I’m curious also, when you are helping maintain these products and offering them as a product through Federated Computer, are you branching off the main plugin or are you just maintaining the original one and saying we’re here to help support you through it?

David Young (20:17.507)
Yeah. So the, the product that federate computer, have engineers and the product that we work on is all the sort of glue that brings all these products together. So you can sort of think of us as the operating system. So we offer unified user management, unified storage, data interoperability, those sorts of things. So while you’re using next cloud and an element matrix and Jitsi and base row and Espos CRM and

get to you and all the different tools, they’re all listed on our website, federated.computer. What we do is we make them work really well out of the box. We make sure that they’re patched, that there’s security, but that they interrupt with each other in the way that you would expect from any big SaaS solution.

Jeffro (21:07.102)
That makes sense. So do you have like a separate version of Zapier for example, or is it just you make sure they directly integrate?

David Young (21:14.019)
Yeah, so we, instead of Zapier, we support an open source project called N8n, which is very similar to Zapier, but it’s open source. And so people can add to it as they need and it works really well.

Jeffro (21:27.934)
Well, that’s cool. think if anybody’s just starting to rethink their stack, is there one area where you think it makes the most sense for them to start experimenting with open source?

David Young (21:37.709)
Yeah, where we see a lot of sort of early success, obviously we offer everything from email to groupware to a replacement for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all those sorts of things that work. And the interesting thing about our platform in that regard is unlike Google Sheets where you’re tied to the Google standard, you get a XLS-based spreadsheet. You get a DOC-based

Word document, etc. But to answer your questions, your customers will come in and maybe they’re using MailChimp for their email marketing or Clavio and we have solutions that are open source and so instead of spending hundreds of dollars and the more success you have your sort of Expenses go through the roof. We have open source solutions like ditto feed and list monk and s post CRM and some other things

that you can easily glue together to build really interesting customer journeys. And that would be in marketing, marketing automation. And that’s been super successful for some of our customers. And everyone is thinking about how they do better when it comes to customer journeys. Now, I hope I think we all get in our inboxes these annoying emails. Hey, you didn’t respond to my last email. It’s been four days and.

I’m going to knock on your door. Hopefully we get better at the, at writing these emails, but those sorts of tools are really, really powerful for customer acquisition. And we have, we have great open source solutions in that regard.

Jeffro (23:18.292)
Awesome. So what else is coming next for you guys? Do you plan to expand into the whole like LLM world as well?

David Young (23:26.093)
That’s a great question. we are actually about to start releasing some better developer tools. So if you are looking to do sort of open source development, we’re going to have some tools to help with that. We just released a enterprise level VPN so that your whole team, wherever they are, can plug into Federated and then print to each other’s printers at home. So sort of cool stuff there as far as

overlay networks that are really simple to set up. You don’t have to be an expert in networking to get that achieved. But with regard to AI, this is something that we’ve been looking at for a long time. We haven’t quite been able to square the, or circle the square, square the circle, whichever way you want to go, as far as cost. So we will be in the near future offering a private AI for people so that they can summarize their calendars, summarize their workload.

But we just haven’t found the right sweet spot for that. But I think we’re all aware of just the tremendous development that’s going on in that space. By the way, it’s all open source. Isn’t that great? So thank you, Alama. Thank you, Meta, for thank you for everyone that’s open sourcing and allowed all this development to happen out in the open. I think that’s really, really positive for the future of that industry, that particular part of our industry.

And we will definitely be offering those sorts of tools as part of Federated.

Jeffro (24:58.331)
Awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing that happen. David, thanks so much for being on the show today. This is something I think a lot of owners haven’t taken the time to think about. And it’s good that we’re able to cover this because this gives people another option that maybe they didn’t even know was available. So for you guys listening at home, you can connect with David and his company using the links in the show notes. Do you have any final thoughts before we end, David?

David Young (25:20.483)
Well, it’s opening day to day and I really hope the Texas Rangers return to win the World Series. How’s that? Have a great day.

Jeffro (25:27.526)
Sounds good. All right. Thanks again, David, for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you found this episode helpful, you do me a huge favor? Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This helps us reach more business owners who are looking to achieve digital dominance in their industry. That’s it for now. Take care and we’ll see you next time.