Episode 795 transcript

FLOSS-795

Jonathan: Hey, this week Doc Searles joins me and we talk with Olaf and Dave about LifeRay, a project that's a little difficult to pin down. It started with the idea of portals, but has grown into a basic building block for building any sort of experience on the web. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 795, recorded August 6th.

Life Ray, now we're thinking with portals.

Hey folks, it is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about Free Libre and open source software. I'm your host Jonathan Bennetts and we've got a fun java filled show today. Once again, it is not just me though. We've got Doc Searles, the the one and only the og. Hey doc. More O than G. A lot more O than G.

Yeah, well, I feel that way some days. Now, you've described your day today as a death march. You've got something going on that you're feverishly getting ready for.

Doc: Yeah, there's an annual event put on by the Internet Archive called D Web Camp, for Distributed Web Camp. And it's at Camp Navarro, it's up in Northern California, among the redwoods.

Where it's fun to see people coming from other countries where all they're doing is standing around looking straight up wondering why These how weird these trees are they're looking at a cloud up there They're looking for the cloud or they think the Ewoks are coming. There you go Because that, that, that particular episode of Star Wars, the Star Wars movies was filmed in the Redwoods.

Oh, okay. But this is, this is much less lush. This is more like dirt on the ground rather than, you know logs and, and, and moss. But, yeah. But it's fun. It's a, it's a fun camp. And, but I, I'm giving a talk. early Thursday morning there. And and I've got a whole thing I'm doing on it and it's, I'm not ready.

So there's that. It's also weird. Cause I mean, it's, it's been, I'm in the middle of Indiana and not much different where you are, where it's hot. It's the summer here. It's hot. And, and it doesn't get cold at night. It stays warm because there's humidity. And In that part of California, it might be 90 in the daytime or, you know, 30 something for those of you elsewhere.

I now give my age as 22. 5 Celsius, actually, so. I like that. Yeah. So that's about how old I am. Anyway. Yeah. But it's cold at night there, so I'm bringing my flannel, my flannel PJs. Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, fun. Well, so we've got a we've got an interesting topic today. We're gonna be talking about LifeRay, and LifeRay from, from what I gather is sort of difficult to put a pin in exactly what it is.

It's a, a low code digital experience portal, which sounds very buzzword y, and I, I think it sounds that way just because they, they try to do so much. Have you gotten a few minutes to look over this, Doc?

Doc: And I, I've had a few minutes to look over the briefing . I'm not, I'm, I'm not hacky enough to have downloaded anything or do any of that for our guests.

I, I was, I worked for Lennox Journal for 24 years, but I was like the business editor. Mm-Hmm. , you know, so not the not a, not a technical guy. So,

Jonathan: and I think, I think this is gonna be a very sort of business oriented show, which is why I I particularly chose you out to be here. I think it'll be real fascinating.

Let's, let's go ahead and bring the guys on though, because obviously we can, we can sit here and talk about what we think it is, but we've got the experts right here. So we've got Dave Nebinger and Olaf Cocke. Welcome to both of you guys. Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's, let's start with this kind of overarching 30, 000 foot view question.

What, what is Life Ray? What do you do with it? What problem does it solve?

Olaf: If we tag team, we probably get most of it. Going historically started as a portal and in times when you could not put different. Individual pieces on a web page and it continues to develop into the many different Things like on the business side.

We call it digital experience platform because yeah, that's the rage That's that's more than a portal that combines content management system that combines Identity management all kinds of single sign on stuff that you might want to build your application with and And then it gets a lot of features.

So it's not a single tiny bit that does a little bit for you, but it's a full application. So we built in several techniques to extend the whole platform to integrate external software. And part of that is now being done through low code environments or no code environments. So you can easily build form based applications through that environment.

And so that, that makes it hard to really grasp. And we've had a couple of fun usages of that, where it actually doubled as one of the systems that you typically integrate with it. So let's say you typically integrate with a single sign on platform, but there is a plugin that can also mask Liferay as a single sign on platform.

But that's like a really niche thing. Dave, what have I forgotten?

Dave: Well, they had to hit more of the buzzwords. We're a CMS, we're a digital asset management platform, and obviously low code that Olaf already mentioned. It's really, like you said, it's hard to put a pin in what Liferay actually is because it can be so much from a simple Hosting platform akin to WordPress all the way up to a complex enterprise platform for building and hosting custom applications that an organization may need, but they don't want to waste all their time building common capabilities like security and authentication and permissions and styling and, and those kind of things that application developers typically need.

The platform kind of encapsulates all those details. So you bring your custom applications and Liferay takes care of all that supporting

Jonathan: stuff for you. Does it, does Liferay fit in sort of the same niche that something like a next cloud would, is it, is it sort of that same idea? I don't know if you'd say it's, if you're familiar with next cloud,

Olaf: Not too much, but I would say it's more than I haven't seen that comparison, so we're not competing with them on any market.

It's rather literally an application, which then integrates something, has one web front end. So think of it as a web server that brings in content from other applications. Like you have your E. R. P. In the background, you have your C. R. M. In the background. Recently, I've been been using the customer portal use case where you come in as a customer or as a citizen to your city's website and you want to tell them, Hey, there's a pothole on the street.

So what do you do? The city needs a ticket, but nobody, no citizen would like to file a ticket and then see all of that metadata mess with 25 25 fields. So in the citizen portal, you will have a front end that says, Hey, where's the pothole? Oh, it's here. How bad, how bad is it? Fire it away. So you get a separate front end to some external backend, which handles all of the ticketing and metadata and so on.

But you Simplify it for the actual front end user. And they don't need to leave that that website or that portal in order to do something else. Like I'll need a new passport. I'll need this or this or that you can do all on the same platform, even though in the backend, it's vastly different things.

Doc: Okay. So, you know, as, as you guys are explaining it, the, the three letter Acronym that jumped into my mind was an IDE. Is that term even used anymore? Does it describe what you were doing?

Dave: We're not really an IDE in that you're developing software for somewhere else. The Liferay platform at its core is serving up web applications JSP pages, all the way through React, Angular other JS frameworks.

It's a hosting platform. That provides a number of services to make it easier for those applications to be built and hosted. So the developers don't have to include those aspects in their own application.

Jonathan: Does Liferay work as the web host itself or does this sit on top of something like Apache?

Dave: We use Tomcat.

So we're leveraging Tomcat and other JEE based servers. We're also compatible with like JBoss and. WebLogic and some of the other big players.

Jonathan: Okay. So this, this would be in the Apache world. We would, we would build something like this, probably a PHP, but you guys are in the Java ecosystem. And so it's, it's all built in Java and then working with the existing Java tools.

Interesting.

Dave: It is, but we're not limited to Java through our extension platform. You can bring. extensions using any language that you're familiar with. If you want to build a NET extension, you can do that. If you want to do all of your development using React, Angular, Vue. js, that's fine. We support that.

And you can leverage the host of Liferay services in your application to implement what you need without having to reinvent the wheel each time.

Jonathan: So it, it really is then like a, it's like a CMS, but it's, it's a CMS that is very much targeted at building like a dashboard and a even a customer experience at the same time.

Olaf: Yeah, let's say the content that is managed by a CMS, the content can be very active, can be an application. And the content receives some services from the platform. One example is, like, why would you need a platform when you can build a perfectly fine React application yourself?

Jonathan: Right.

Olaf: Well let's say you need a user identity.

So, yeah, that's fine, you can sign in, you can sign out, that's fine. Fine. For, for you, as I, if you build on this platform, you get one kind of user identity. And if later on you decide, actually, I don't want to bother with any password anymore. I'll outsource that to some single sign on system. The user identity that the application interfaces with stays exactly the same.

When you say, oh, we want like we've started in a very small environment, but we want to change now to an LDAP system. Then the user identity stays exactly the same, but it's now fueled by LDAP. And if the company merges and decides to now bring in two LDAP or N LDAP systems then, yeah, who cares?

You still deal with one user identity that comes with permissions services and so on. And that user identity is, is what you use in your front end application, no matter if they are authenticated by a single sign on system, multi factor authentication what the password policy on those is if they come through LDAP and so on.

So there's the value for building on a platform.

Jonathan: Yeah. What, what did the origin of Liferay look like? Like, what was the what was the initial problem with that? And I'm, I'm curious, were, were one of you two at the beginning? Did, did either of you guys write, you know, the first lines of code? And then what, what did that look like?

Olaf: No, we're actually veterans. So but both of us are not there to write productive code on the platform. I'm with a company now for 14 years and a bit. Dave is a little bit shorter but he has been working with a product since forever. The actual product started around the year 2000 when Brian, the company founder needed a website for his church.

Oh, interesting. And he completely nerded out, over engineered everything, and you can imagine a church website actually needs to perform really well. And performing really well in the 2000s, or in 2000 actually meant, when you know Java, what does it mean? EJB. So it went all the way in and and completely over engineered.

He solved the problem. I'm, I'm actually not, I'm actually not sure that the the church website was ever served by life, right? I don't know, but, but that's the origins. And then like, People people found it and and asked for support or contributed something asked for for help setting it up.

And from then on it, it completely like it, it went hockey stick and, and up. So to say in 2004, there was a company that was founded or the company was founded.

Olaf: And it's now, actually I didn't count them, I'd say 20 offices worldwide, so lots of local companies, and what, what else is there?

Oh. And the formally purely open source version then turned into a dual licensed offering. Mm-Hmm. . So the open source and a commercial offering, which in my eyes, I, I was around, I was at exactly the event where it was announced and it totally made sense to me. Because up until then they had like 10 12 customers that were all on different branches.

Olaf: I think it was subversion back then. So everybody had their own branch. So bringing on yet another customer and another one and another one with all with their own branches does not really make sense. So you want them all on a single branch or on like a limited number of branches and you can have an unlimited number of customers.

And they want longer support. And they I want to have someone who is responsible who says, Yeah. Oh, yeah. We're responsible for what we do. So that that started the back then so called Enterprise Edition. And as I've started with EJB when Enterprise Edition came in, EJB was already long out.

So, so coming back to the code side there is no more EJB in there, don't worry. It's, it now is a modern platform, but it could still serve your church's website. Yeah.

Jonathan: Interesting.

Dave: If, if you remember the, the early two thousands, the primary interface that everyone was going for was really the screen with a primary content and then a number of boxes on the side, either on the right side or on the left side.

Mm-Hmm. . And this was the kind of interface you'd see if you went to stand n.com or Yahoo News or, or any of those kind of things. And out of that. There was a big push to adopt what were called portals. And there was a Java specification to define what a portal was. And when you look at Liferay Liferay had looked at what was available from a Java portal perspective, but there was really no good open source alternatives out there.

And our platform was built as an open source implementation of the specification for a portal container that would host portlets. And that's where it started from, but these days it is so much more that we don't even call it a portal anymore. It's, it's a DXP because of all the capabilities that it now has.

So

Doc: I'm wondering, okay, so A digital experience platform, I guess that's what that stands for. Is anybody else using that? Do you have any direct competitors? Do you have a category called DXP and there's you guys and there's that one and that one and that one? Is that, where's that at?

Dave: Adobe is probably the biggest one that folks will lean to when they're learning about DSP platforms.

But, you know, us compared to Adobe, we're open source, they're not. That's great. We're an integrated platform because all of our capabilities we built and add to the platform natively. So the whole usage across the platform is consistent. Adobe kind of purchased theirs and pieced them together. So they're more of a hodgepodge, shall we say.

And moving around between the different components is often not as. Cohesive as what you might see in the Liferay platform, but there's other others in the Magic quadrant by Gartner that also do DXP platforms, but we are the only open source player in that market

Doc: Is it a magic quadrant of DXPs or there are DXPs in a oh really?

Okay. Yes. Yes. That's interesting

Jonathan: What what license is the project go with

Dave: So we have two licenses. We use LGPL for the community edition. We also have a it's a special license that for the commercial aspect.

Jonathan: Is is is this an open core project? Like are there bits that are in the commercial offering that are not in the open source part?

Olaf: They're,

Jonathan: they're the, the way

Dave: the code works now, the repository has everything, okay? Both the, the open code as well as the not open the commercial code it's all in the repository. It's just the license that protects the usage of that in commercial situations.

Jonathan: And, and so what's the, what's , what, what's the, what's the catch there?

Right? Like what's, what's the difference? So, and, and I guess part of this question is why, why would someone. want to come and use that, that commercial license?

Dave: Well, for the most part, the commercial aspect is going to bring support. It's going to bring access to our cloud based offerings. We're unique in that you can self host your platform, but we also have cloud offerings.

The cloud offering is for the commercial side. So there's a number of reasons that an organization will say, we, we want to go with the the subscription to LifeRay rather than the open source version. But the open source platform is just as capable on many aspects for hosting any kind of website. The big distinction between the two tends to be the enterprise y sort of capabilities that a client might need, such as, you know, using an Oracle enterprise database as opposed to an open source database like MySQL or Postgres.

If they need enterprise connectivity for SAML or OpenID Connect, those kind of pieces will fall under the enterprise side. But for generic sort of open source connectivity, you can use the Community Edition for that.

Olaf: And if I'm really nitpicking then there is the, the price for the license for the commercial, as well as for the open source version is exactly the same.

The license is there for zero. What we do is the services subscription, which literally then is access to longer maintenance to, to support, to get hot fixes on exactly the version that you're running and so on. And then the service level on top of that. So, yes, you can you can file issues on the open source version but there is naturally no surface level attached to that.

We're very interested in that, but the on the enterprise level where we have a contract with our customers we do guarantee your surface level.

Jonathan: Mm hmm. Makes sense.

Doc: So, I'm, I'm curious about case histories. You, you mentioned the City of Vienna and Hewlett Packard Enterprise on your website.

But I'm interested in hearing about those kind of things, but also the open source ones. Ones where you're actually not involved, but you know they're there, and they're busy kind of proving your case. Can you go over some of those?

Dave: Yeah, from the community side There's a major American automaker that for years had used Liferay to host their internal intranet.

They built out a complete solution for all their employees to access. Much to our chagrin, of course, we, we would have preferred that they would have gone with the the subscription model, but they were able to build their solution on the Community Edition. The flip side of that is, from the commercial side, we've hosted many different types of platforms.

From a children's site that hosted games and videos and, and things that, that kids would be interested in. All the way up to websites for some of the U. S. military branches. Enterprises of all kinds, banks, insurance, manufacturing. We also do internet based solutions, extranet. Internet front facing brochure websites.

The platform is really flexible in how you can use it to solve any sort of web based problem. And the fact that it's a DXP means we can provide the content regardless of what kind of device you come to us with. If you're on a mobile, you're going to get a responsive platform. If you're on a tablet, it's going to also be responsive versus a desktop.

But ultimately, you're going to get the same kind of experience. And from a platform level, we can follow you across those devices and make sure that we are tailoring content and personalize it for each visitor so that we can help target them to meet whatever the business needs are.

Doc: I was wondering about, so it's interesting when I went to your website I'm, I've been in my work as a journalist is basically around privacy and and I'm Always looking at, at the cookie interfaces and you guys had tracking cookies for targeting turned on by default. And, and I'm wondering if and, and I rejected it because I'm actually not in your market.

So I thought, okay, well, I kind of don't feel like being tracked. How's it going with that? I'm just curious about if you have any intel, intel as it were on, on people turning that on and off or that helping or hurting your. Your cause as people get into their, the websites, because websites are basically where you manifest for the most part, I would think.

Dave: Well, when you, when you hit liferay. com, you must realize that is our marketing site. And the cookies that we're using there are designed to help us to promote our products to the right audience and then track how they respond to that information. It's not meant meant to you You know, follow you throughout the web and use it for any nefarious purposes.

It's more for our business aspects. And when you say you're not in our market, well, you know, we like to think that everyone is, we're a worldwide company, we have offices all around the world, we have organizations using our platform for many different businesses and purposes. So, we like to think that everyone is our mark.

Doc: Well, I, I, I like to be in your market, but as, as somebody who's 22.5 years old Celsius

it's unlikely in the fullness

Olaf: of what's left of my time. Well, you, you're still, you're still the person with the most browsers on a single computer that it seems that way. It seems king of the browsers.

Doc: Yeah. Yeah, I just added DuckDuckGo actually as another browser. I play with the, how can you say about how large your market is in terms of sales?

I guess it's mostly enterprise sales. And if you can't, that's fine. You save a lot of offices, so it must be doing pretty well.

Olaf: Yeah. So the last thing I've seen is I think it was more than a thousand or a thousand, 200 customers. on it. We don't really follow that, or I don't really follow that closely because like a rough ballpark to me is enough.

There is the one aspect I've mentioned Brian as the founder of the project, and he's still around. And as Dave said, we're one of the few On this market who allow you to pick self hosting or cloud hosting pass or sass All of that works for us and we're committed to all of them. We're also One off if not the only large open source software company that is still operating completely and absolutely without any vendor Not vendor venture capital So it's full fully owner owned or founder owned and there is nothing Nothing coming in In fact, there were offers, but the story that I've heard about them was when the the venture capital companies were asked.

So assume you give us money, what should we do with it that we don't do already? They couldn't answer so

And

Dave: the additional thing is the the community edition we don't do any kind of tracking or tracing on so You can download the community edition use it in your business use it in your church use it in your Interest group for whatever reason, we're not really going to have any visibility on that. So, you know, you're, you're kind of free to run away with that and, and use it as you like.

From our side, though, obviously, you know, we're, we're not tracking and tracing that. So we, we don't really know how widely used the Community Edition is actually used out in the wild.

Olaf: Yeah. And as Dave said the, like liferate. com is our marketing site. There is the community site, which is liferate.

dev. And I haven't checked it, but if you look at that, I'm, I'm quite sure that there is no external tracking whatsoever. There might be the, the actual, yeah, we're using cookies. I think that's there. But I am not aware that we have configured any marketing like tracking external thing there. I just

Doc: brought it up.

Nothing happened. That's good. It's a very old fashioned that way. Oh, no, there's a tiny, this website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more or accept. But there's no third

Olaf: party cookies that I'm aware of. Yeah,

Doc: yeah, yeah.

Jonathan: I Very good. I, I guess this is, this is an opinion shared by many people, but I am so sick of the, this website uses cookies pop up.

And every time I just say, yes, put cookies on my computer. That's fine because it's, it's just a website. Storing a little bit of data on your machine to make the web, like that's how the web has always worked. I, I, I am very unhappy with European laws for cursing all of us with that dumb little pop up.

But that's, that's an entire rabbit trail. Yes, the, the The idea of venture capital is really interesting. So we've talked to some people that have had venture capital and it's worked for them. And then you also talk to people that have had venture capital and it really changes the project or it changes the company that, that, you know, was started from an open source mindset.

And then there's even now some venture capital groups out there that are like the VC is intended to be friendly with open source And I find it really fascinating that life ray Didn't ever have to go down that route And I I think probably why is just listening to you talk about it from the very beginning when it was just Hey, let's build a portal for a church The concept was sticky.

There was something about it that when, when other engineers, when other web people heard it, they went, Oh, that's cool. And is it, is it still sticky? Do you still have that, that you know, that kind of aha moment when someone finally understands what it is that Liferay is they go, Oh, that's really cool.

I could use that. It, do you still get that?

Dave: Oh, we do, but it's changed over time, right? Initially. When you went to Google, you could search for portal software and, and you would find a WebSphere portal from IBM. And there were a number of other portal platforms that were out there that have gone the way of the Dodo, right.

They've all but disappeared. Liferay is the last one standing in that market. So, you know, we don't even like to talk to Liferay as a, as a portal platform, because. It's not hip to be up for the platform. So now, you know, obviously the market is more interested in DXPs and CMS, headless CMS digital asset management, those aspects low code and everyone's favorite AI.

So we're, we're growing the platform over time to stay relevant and incorporate the kind of capabilities and functionalities that businesses are looking for in a platform such as ours. But that has changed how we have stayed relevant.

Jonathan: Is there is there a big buy in with AI in Liferay? Is that something that's here already or is coming?

Dave: We have a number of integration points already. When you're building CMS. Sites, you can leverage a generative AI to help you build content. There are other aspects for allowing for image generation and auto translation features, which is really been a great help to many of our clients.

We have one client with uses over 70 languages on their platform and they AI auto translation to previously before that capability was in there, it would take them months to coordinate a release because they had to make sure that all the content had been correctly translated into the 70 languages.

Now they're doing it in a matter of weeks. Because AI is allowing them to get that content translated into the languages they need. And then they're just coming in and reviewing and fixing the obvious problems that AI has with, you know, understanding correctly and translating correctly.

Olaf: I can say it's a good help for me or great help for me.

I'm in my day job, I'm a sales engineer. So I'm always asked to demo the platform to various different people. And I mean, as, as much as AI can hallucinate whatever, I do not care about it being, being exact to demonstrate, to demonstrate platform. It's totally easy to say, Hey, write me 10 articles about how the financial world like blog articles about how the financial world changed in the past 10 years.

Make it 200 words and more go. They have AI has AI

Jonathan: has replaced the lorem ipsum for you. That's

Olaf: exactly it.

Jonathan: That's great. I

Olaf: have a lorem ipsum on my stream deck in front of me. But I'm rarely using it anymore.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's funny. I even

Olaf: have bacon ipsum on there. Bacon

Doc: ipsum. So, inside your product, I mean If, in using AI there, I think you said you use it there, not just to help with marketing.

Do you, do you go to the clods and open AIs, or do you download Llama and work with one of the open source alternatives? No, we, well,

Dave: we define interfaces for everything and then back that by implementation. So we have a generic interface that defines how to use generative text, for example.

Internally, then, we will implement that in various different flavors, whether it's going to OpenAI or Cloud or Gemini when they have APIs that we can plug into and use. We have not yet. a module around a self contained large language module. Not to say that we couldn't do that but I think what you run into is having the the muscle and the processing power to host that kind of thing on your own.

I think generally the best consensus is to try to leverage one of those services rather than, you know, Train and host your own

Olaf: and as the whole platform is built on those apis Now the back end is built on osgi or around osgi And I always like to stress that everything is based on an api It is up to the customer as well to say like hey This is a a nice implementation, but why would I want my send data over to them?

I want my data to stay here or to, to go to that provider. So the interface is open and the whole platform allows you to just deploy a tiny module that then implements the interface to interface with the system that you want. That will be Java, like on the OSGI side. Yes, there will be a Java module, but more and more of those modules, we provide a headless interface for that.

You can just trigger from the outside. And then you're, you're again on, on whatever whatever language you want, because the only thing that's in common then is rest.

Jonathan: So I am poking around at some of your websites and I find myself at liferay. dev, which is sort of the, the main open source community site.

And I see down at the bottom powered by the Liferay portal CE and oh, it's like seeing companies eat their, eat their own dog food. As we say is the Liferay portal used a lot internally for Liferay? Like how many, how many instances of it do you think you guys have across the company? Every host.

Dave: Interesting platform we offer is running on life brand.

Jonathan: Yeah. , that's so a lot. . Yes.

Dave: And, and honestly, eating our own dog food makes the product better. Oh, absolutely. We find the bugs that, that bother us. Mm-Hmm. . And we, you know, we fix those. So, you know, having ourselves as our own customer just makes the product that much better, more stable, resilient, and secure.

And that also, I'm sorry, but that also means when we extend this out to clients, they're getting the same level of support and security and everything that we need for our own business.

Jonathan: It's always a little worrying actually when you interview a company, we talked to a company that does open source that doesn't use their own open source project.

You just have to wonder about that. It's like something went wrongs here somewhere along the way. That's right. I'm curious about scaling, right? Like so you've got some big customers and and this, this is where really, I reveal some of my ignorance about doing, How Tomcat works really and how the Java ecosystem works.

I'm curious like how big does this scale up to and what does that look like?

Dave: How much money do you have? Well, that's always the

Jonathan: question now, isn't it?

Dave: Yeah, well, you know, and I joke, but it will scale up as large as you need it to be. So if you have just a requirement for a thousand concurrent users, You're probably going to use like a two cluster node for that.

But if you have 10, 000 concurrent users or you want to protect it against being slashed on it, you're going to go a lot larger there, but that's fine. Our platform is built around being stable and secure and steady in a clustered environment so that it is. It's returning the right data. Nothing is stale or returned out of any of the cluster nodes.

It's really meant to be a resilient platform regardless of the size that you need.

Jonathan: And, and I assume that the clustering is sort of built into it or it's built into Tomcat maybe? No, it's

Dave: built into the platform. So we have each node forms a, what we refer to as a mesh network. And there's messaging going back and forth saying, Hey, I just saved this blog.

If you have an old version, you should dump it. And you know, that kind of messaging is handled across the platform. So it becomes a a very strong way to ensure that all nodes are up to date and always returning the latest content.

Jonathan: Yeah. And then do you have multiple, multiple nodes sitting behind like a a traffic manager or are these.

Are these, you know, separated out geographically and you use DNS to point people at different places? I'm just, I'm just curious, however you want to

Dave: do it. Yeah. Typically it will in simple cases, you're talking about just a small cluster with a load balancer sitting in front of it. But we do support doing geographically distant regional centers where you're hosting Liferay and, and depending upon what your requirements are you can build all those kinds of things and they will work with Liferay.

Olaf: I got to say it's regional though. So it's not around the world. It's not one server for Europe, one for the, for the Americas and so on, but it's more or less regional. So it's in the end, it operates on a, on a consistent database. And which can also be clustered. No matter what. So typically, the best understood system that I see is a load balancer and then any number of nodes behind it.

And it also works quite well with content delivery networks. So you can configure all kinds of caching headers and make sure that a request doesn't even hit the platform if it's not necessary. Right. But of course, if it's if it's not publicly visible, you want the platform to be hit for every single download, for example, or access of a page, not for all of the CSS and JavaScript, though.

Jonathan: Yeah, makes sense. All right. So to go in a different direction, I want to know about the community involvement. And I guess particularly in the, the, the community edition, but I suppose this, this would apply to both of them because the source is available even for the the, the enterprise edition. So like, what's the, what's the community involvement look like?

How many, you know, how many contributors are there outside of the company? And what, what does that, what does that look like?

Dave: Well contributing to Liferay takes many forms, right? There's, there's contributing just by joining the forums, joining the Slack channels and answering questions and things like that.

We, we count those in our community as contributors because they are helping to strengthen the community and build it out from a platform perspective. We do, Accept and want to accept changes and pull requests from outside the organization. The challenge for us, which may be unique to pure open source projects, since our platform is also a product, it is the product that we sell, the challenge for us is how to, how to accept Those pull requests, how to accept those changes, and oftentimes it, it will require some iterations with the contributor to get it into a form that we can accept and approve and merge into the platform because once we get that merged in, you know, we're taking over ownership and responsibility for that.

So the challenge is often how do we, how do we take those submissions? How do we transform them so that they are enterprise level, enterprise quality, and then get them merged into the system? It's not the fast process that you might expect with a typical open source process. Yeah. But it does exist.

Olaf: Yeah, there is another aspect to that. Because everything is open source. an API or has an API. One of the standard ways to extend the platform is to not at all build from source. And and contribute something to the core, because the core is built of Dave correct me if I'm wrong, thousand plus modules which is typically a separation of API modules and implementation modules and so on, and you can easily drop yet another module.

They're tiny, they're small, and you can implement them. Just in addition, and they do not need to be developed or delivered with a core, you can put them on the marketplace, for example, or publish them on your GitHub or anywhere. So it doesn't need to be a contribution that puts something back into the core.

That's the way I have started contributing by. Number one, making suggestions. Number two, publishing some random proof of concept things on on the blog to show like, hey, I've tried something this actually works. And fun fact I have, I've driven several of our developers nuts when they ask me if If something runs on master and I said, I don't know, I've never built master, but like that now finally broke down after 14 years, I have compiled from source for the very first time because I wanted to contribute some code that I want to be in the core.

Jonathan: So I've got to say we're talking about the, the, maybe the difficulty of contributing. The project has 929 contributors. Now it's been around for a long time, but just looking, looking and this is just looking at life ray portal, the main, the pro what seems to be the main GitHub repository, 929 contributors.

That's, that's pretty good. That's quite a few. Is there, is there a CLA to ask people to sign a CLA to contribute? I would assume you have to, to be able to do a license. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's, I know some in the open source community are not happy about CLAs and I understand why. But at the same time, when you're doing something with a big business like this, it, it makes a lot of sense.

And I think the other thing with that why people don't like them is, To sign a CLA and then the code, the license code, the code license gets changed. People sometimes feel a little betrayed by it, but that's not the case here. You already have the licensing in place. People know what they're getting into when they send the pull request in.

And so I, in my opinion, I think that that makes CLAs even a little more palatable because everything is upfront. You know exactly what it is. And the other thing I wanted to mention with that is I appreciate that the proprietary license. is out there and available for people to look at. It's not something that's hidden.

You don't have to agree to, you know, you don't have to sign an NDA before you get to look at the license. And I appreciate that a lot. It it's it's a testament that, you know, the company actually believes in what they're doing and you're not trying to strong arm people into it.

Dave: Yeah. And all of our license is really just to protect the product, right?

We want to make sure that when you're using it, you're not. Like stealing and giving away our technology to somewhere else. That's all it is. It's not meant to hamper adoption of the product either from a community or a product perspective.

Olaf: There's also another aspect. So it, it almost led to me asking a third person on here, but he would be good for an episode all on his own.

One of our legal team guys, the most nerdy lawyer that I know. So he, he is deeply enrouted in the in the open source ecosystem. And he gave us the hint that we actually sponsored now I'll have to look that up. I forgot the the exact project some of the the license scanners that actually go through everything and let you know if you are matching that license or if there's some, some foreign code in there Dave, maybe you can look it up while I talk it's Matt, Mattias answered to it.

So and these guys came back to us and, basically we, we paid them to to build all of their code for the Java. Instance, as far as I understand that Mateo would be the the authority on that. And with our code, like with that code base of a thousand modules of, I, God knows how many lines of code that is, they basically have seen it all.

So that tool now should be quite rock solid with regards to Java. Yeah, interesting. Did you find it?

Dave: Yeah, it would be a scan code IO and reuse that software.

Jonathan: There you go. That's it. Yeah. Do you guys ever see things in the the, the, the proprietary license, the, the, excuse me, the enterprise edition make it into the community edition, is there kind of a flow where things go down that way after, and I know some, some businesses, some, some projects have, have this codified, like we build it for the Enterprise and then once we make X amount of money with it, it goes into the community edition.

I always thought that was an interesting way to approach it. Is there anything like that in Liferay?

Olaf: I want to nitpick there and say no, because it's better. It's all out in the open anyway. Like the code is dual licensed and to cut a release. The one thing that we do with the enterprise edition is we have bi weekly releases that are bug fixes and that go quite a while back.

While on the community side we, we do provide the quarterly releases and if there is an emergency that there was none for a while, then yes, we'll do that as well. But on the community side, you're typically on the latest version and but, but all of the code, all of like, if you compile master, this is what goes into the next release both at the same time.

Oh,

Jonathan: okay. So there's not. It, it, it literally is not open core. Then there's, there's not anything missing out of the community edition. There's, there's one code base. No. So there, there's

Olaf: nothing that could trickle out. Okay. Because it's all the dual license anyway.

Jonathan: I gotcha. I, I misunderstood the way that worked then.

I appreciate, I'm glad we, glad we cleared that up. . Alright. Doc, is there anything that you wanna make sure and get in? I think you had one or two more questions. Well,

Doc: I,

Jonathan: yeah.

Doc: I mean, one is when you're sh all of, you're saying you're, you're a sales engineer, but when you're showing off what. what what life rate can do.

What do you point to? I mean, what's, what's your, what are your canonical examples? I mean, I look at your customers, you've got some pretty heavy customers there, you know, and you know, you've Jose Cuervo. So that beer, you know, and Carrefour Airbus, I mean, city of Burbank, I imagine they're using it in very, very different ways, but But it'd be, I mean, it'd be one interesting thing to say, you know, when you're flying an Airbus that, you know, we keep the wings from falling off or some other thing, but I, Yeah.

Olaf: Yeah. So what we typically do is, number one, we have a discovery call up front so that I know which part are they interested in. And then when we have a demo call, it might be an hour, it might be two hours. I prepare something, either I pick a, a stock demo that we have and customize that a bit, sometimes it even works.

Like if I can offer, Hey, we have a matching point that I can demo tomorrow. Or I can prepare something better for you for next week. Sometimes people just opt for tomorrow and then how I open An hour quite often in the last times is that I explain what I'm going to do. I just give an agenda. So we'll go through, for example the content management part in the first 10 minutes, then we'll go into personalization, into integrating other platforms.

Then we'll go for lunch in the afternoon. We come back and then we cover the commerce features and, and DevOps. For the rest of the week we'll go, hold on. Oh, excuse me. I just hear we only have an hour. So I guess I'll have to severely limit myself and, and just pick a very small fraction of what we have.

So that's how I typically do that or very often do that. If only to demonstrate that or to show that just because I haven't demonstrated a particular feature doesn't mean it's not in. But because we by far don't have any time.

Dave: Yeah, there's so many capabilities in the platform itself. There's no one demo that works for everyone.

Each organization will come in with different things that they need, whether they're looking for CMS capabilities or document management or hosting videos or whatever. Hosting custom applications. They all have different requirements, so there's no one demo that we can show them on the platform that's going to check off the boxes that they are interested in.

So we want to know the kind of things that they want to see, and then we show them how we can solve those things using LifeRay. And most of the time it's using out of the box LifeRay. The. We're at a point now where the the capabilities on the platform with low code and objects and Everything else that we support Fragments and whatnot.

It's really easy to get solutions at work without having to invest a lot of money to make it happen

Doc: So you don't go and say well, this is how HP did it or this is how Airbus did it. It's so customized to what any particular customer needs. You just go straight into it Yes,

Olaf: It's either fully customized or like we have a starting point for an intranet.

We have a starting point for a customer portal. We have a starting point for a manufacturing site that is more commerce heavy and so on. So we can pick some and sometimes I pick a demo to start with that is deliberately from a different industry because like it's a, it's a customer portal. Touching a different industry rather than the, the commerce sites demonstrating the same industry that they are from.

So, I

Doc: wonder if, if you guys are, are at the point of success or maturation, or maybe this doesn't apply. That there are other businesses that specialize in Liferay installation. That's when you know you've made it.

Olaf: Now for as long as I'm with a company, we have a partner network. So the company business is very purely on, or yeah, not exactly only, but mostly on, we're a product vendor.

And the implementations are very often done by our partners, which is independent companies that then go in by the hour and they implement on top of our platform. We have our own global services team, so there are internal consultants, but we It's only a few areas in the world where we actually have them in order to do such projects.

Mostly, we use them, as far as I understand, might be different in different parts of the world. But I understand that we mostly use them to support the partners to do something like validating best practices and making sure that, for example, a site performs well. to, to stand by their side with performance tests, because we do performance tests all the time.

And we might as well extend that to the partner network. So technically we're the product vendor and the partners, like the whole people that build on top of it. That's I think 150, 200 partners worldwide. So there is quite some business built on top of Liferay, which we're happy with. So we're very happy to refer business to those to those partners.

Dave: And we do a lot of training with them and work with them and communications. So they have opportunities to provide feedback on how the platform is working for them and changes that they need. We really rely on our partners to handle the bulk of the implementations and to get the feedback from them in order to help improve and make the platform better.

Jonathan: Okay. So in thinking about, Everything that Liferay lets you do. I'm sure you have businesses that use this or even people use this or something like a, a knowledge database, you know, like an internal wiki, you have people that use it for customer management as well as public facing websites. So like there's, there's a bunch of different things that you could set up with a Liferay install.

And I want to know, what are some of the weird and surprising things that y'all are aware of that people do with Liferay? For me, the

Dave: one example is the, the, the kids site. With the games and the videos, I, I guess I can throw the name out there. Sesame Street for a long time, they were hosted on Liferay and you know, that's kind of a weird use because, you know, normally we're, we're going in, we're doing enterprise sites, right?

You know, so standard boxes, standard fonts, things like that. And. The rules changed when Sesame Street was using our platform. So for me, that that's, that's the weirdest one that I've seen based on the platform.

Olaf: Yeah, they, they aren't, they aren't using it anymore, though. Sadly. I loved referring to them because it was the most colorful site that I could point to back then.

Yeah. I would say the weirdest question that I ever got, I think they never executed. The idea was by a manufacturer of some medical devices. I want to say something like MRI or like that scale of machines, right? Who wanted who were asking for OEM licenses with support for a single user. So, basically, to build that in, to build in a web server and a browser in kiosk mode into their device, and serve a single user on top of the platform, and just use it as the, basically, the frame for the building blocks of or, and being able to compose an application out of many different small elements that use the same infrastructure.

I'm not sure what came out of that, because I have learned about that long before, Before I became a sales engineer and actually looked at the projects and, and had to to basically sell them.

Jonathan: Yeah. All right. Good answers. Okay. So now this is a hard question. You got to do some set math here. Is there, is there anything that we did not, because we're getting close to the fact we're past the bottom of the hour, thanks to some technical difficulties at the beginning of the show.

Is there anything that we didn't touch on that we didn't ask you about that you really wanted to let folks know about the project? I

Olaf: think I've mentioned once or twice just the vocabulary and that those teams would be mad if we don't explicitly make sure that in all of the description of what Liferay is, we barely touched that there is a full fledged commerce front end in there as well.

So I, I managed to drop the commerce syllables sometimes, but in general, we did not talk about that aspect of the platform at all. Oh, yeah, that's interesting. And other than that no, I could only tell you a funny story about the origin of the name.

Jonathan: So. Oh, please do. Yeah, I want to hear that, for sure.

Olaf: So I guess I have heard it five years, at least five years ago, probably rather 10 years ago. So what came up to that is Brian, our founder used to what was that? Or met a guy in university. And his name is Ray. And they figured we're going to do something like they had a business idea and they wanted to build something.

And it was a medical device. Now, they were about to start a company and Ray said, the only way I am going to create a company is if my name is in there. So they figured, hey, medical device. So what's it? It's Death Ray. Oh, no, that's a bad idea for a medical device. So what's the opposite? That's Life Ray. So Brian was quick to just buy the domain.

And and then he never saw Ray again.

Jonathan: Huh. That's funny. That's funny. So, and when,

Olaf: and when years later he had the project he was like, oh, how do I name it? I got to pick a name for SourceForge back then, I believe. So what do I publish it as? I was like, oh, I have this domain lying around, so let's use that.

Jonathan: That's great. That's the story

Olaf: I've heard. That's great. And I believe it's true.

Jonathan: No, it doesn't sound, it sounds, it sounds true. That's the sort of, yeah. Dave, is there anything that you want to cover that we didn't ask about?

Dave: Man, just, if anyone wants to know more about Liferay, they can find us on the, our community Slack channel, you know, both Olaf and I are very prevalent on there and would be happy to answer any questions someone might have.

Jonathan: All right. Very good. Now I've got to ask each of you before we, before we let you go, we'll start with Olaf. What is your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Olaf: Hmm. For the text editor, I'm promiscuous. I just use whatever is there. If I have to do, like, I, I am on Ubuntu and I'm happy to use KDE if I need a full fledged IDE much to Dave Chagrin, I'm using Eclipse.

And if I'm on the shell and I need an editor there, I open vi. But if my Git commit opens a nano, who cares? ,

Jonathan: I, I know that feeling and it, and in scripting

Olaf: language, I rarely do something, but I would say bash. That's, that's fair.

Jonathan: Alright, Dave. VI and Perl. Ooh, . You're the go-to Oh, well, old school. Old school.

Old school, yes. . Alright. Excellent. Thank you guys for being here. And you know, like I said, we got started a little bit late, but I think, I think we made the time up in goodness. It went fast. It was a lot of fun talking to you about it and it did a lot of fun to, to learn about life. Ray, something I was completely unaware of, but really, really interesting and apparently out there in a lot of places, so appreciate it.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doc: It was great. All right. Doc, what do you think? I, it, it's interesting to me that again, it's a, I think one of the largest enterprise, I mean, not enterprise, I guess it's a company, you know, I mean, a project that I wasn't aware of, you know, and that, that's like you, I wasn't aware of it and it's and it's interesting and it's interesting how many people are using it and now.

How well it seems to be working, and how capable it is, and how broad it is. All that stuff. It's kind of like, it is all singing and dancing, and they can actually pull it off, so, that's You

Jonathan: know, what fascinates me about this is, like, so first off, it was the beginning of this project was so specific.

It was, it was one guy making a website for his church, but he said, Well, this portals thing is popular. It's what's hot right now. Let me try to do that. And, So that immediately, because they tapped into portals, immediately it was, like I said, it was sticky. Like, it's something that you see it and you immediately go, Ooh, that's really interesting.

And then, it seems like what has happened over the years, and I should have asked him about this and didn't it seems like there's been a lot of what we would normally refer to as feature creep. Like, oh, it would be cool if it did this. It would be cool if it had, you know, a low code. It would be cool if you could drag and drop things.

It would be cool if there were integrations. It would be cool if it could do this, that, and the other thing. And normally that kills a project. But Feature Creep can, can make projects huge and unwieldy and, but it seems like in this case, I, I, and I guess this is because of the management at the top.

They've managed that Feature Creep to where they now have this like cohesive set of features. people really like. And, and that's, that's interesting to me that as an open source project and as a business that they've, they've charted those waters so successfully, apparently successfully, as big as they are and still making money.

So.

Doc: And, and, and funny that they were in a portals business and portal was a big term back in the last millennium, you know, and I, I, I remember I was at a party in San Francisco back when I lived in that area and which I did for a long time and it was in the late nineties and there was this, You know all these young guys wearing black clothes and goatees and like us, we're the ones, but anyway, they're, and and it was overlooking San Francisco from up near Twin Peaks and, and this guy You know, you're just talking at this thing.

And I said, so what do you, he says, well we have this new startup. And I said, yeah, what do you do? So we're an arms merchant to the portals industry. And I said, portals, it's an industry. He says, yeah. And, and, and he gave me nothing but BS about all the BS of the time. And, and I finally asked him how are sales thinking that would be an insulting question because they were venture funded, right.

And, and And he said, they're great. We just closed our second round of financing for 25 million. And, and I thought it was a, it was an epiphany for me because I realized, wait a minute, there are two ways a company may, you know, two markets for a company. One is for its goods and services and one is for its own ass.

I'm for sale. I'm going to go you know, but these guys, life rate, I mean, They're not venture funded. I think that's actually very cool that they're, they're entirely bootstrapped. It just works. That's, that is really unusual and, and, and there's, and they're not looking at an exit and I'm telling you there's.

As somebody who's encouraged development for a long time and it always goes to venture and it always the the looking at the exit looking at your way off this highway Where you don't even own the company anymore. The public owns you don't care. You've got your cash your You you've got the boat in florida now or whatever it is.

And and You know, but but you know the purely practical this thing exists because it's a good thing it works You It's growing in the world. It doesn't need to, you know, advertise itself heavily. It's pretty cool.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah,

Doc: that's great.

Jonathan: Yeah, fun, fun project. Definitely one to keep our eyes on. All right Doc, do you have anything you want to plug?

Doc: Oh my gosh I'll plug IAW, because the Internet Identity Workshop is coming up at the end of October. Look up my Internet Identity Workshop. I, I have a short I, I, I pay for II Workshop every year, but it's so slow to go over there. But anyway it's always full of people. A lot of great things happen there.

It's relatively cheap as conferences go. It has no panels, no It's just all, it's all, it's all demo and and have fun with it. And Talk about your new idea. It doesn't have to be about identity either. So, and I'm very encouraged about this one because we have some, some people who want to do the crap I've been telling him to do for a thousand years, you know, I mean, for, for, I guess they were still listening in.

I mean, I I'm big at having markets work from the customer side, how let's equip the customers to be more powerful. And this is a really, a real heavy in that space. That wants to be there and they're going to be there and it's going to be really cool. So, yeah, that's a little tease. All right. Yeah.

Excellent.

Jonathan: So we've got something fun coming up next week. We're actually going to talk with John Britton from Homebrew. And they now have something new they call Workbrew. Which is, it is apparently the, so Homebrew is running homebrew. com. Compiling and running like Unix and Linux applications on Mac OS and it's been it's been around for a long time It's been very popular among the enthusiasts people like me and you But what workbrew is is taking that and making it more commercial friendly And I'm really fascinated to find out what all is going on with that.

We're talking with them next week. And then as far as things for me to plug I've got my, I've got my log scroll up right now. You can tell what I was messing with before the show, but normally what shows up here on this monitor is Hackaday. You can find my work at hackaday. com. We've got well, that's.

The home of Floss Weekly, but it's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning and the occasional other thing. The only other thing that I've got that I will let you know about is the untitled Linux show over at Twit, the Twit network, twit. tv. And you can find ULS there to keep up with all of the news around Linux and some other open source and hardware stuff sprinkled in.

We've kind of found our, found our niche there. But make sure to check that out. Appreciate everybody being here, our guests, appreciate Doc being here and everyone watching and listening both live and on the download. And we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.