Zilliz partner Gu Jun: Open source has changed the traditional software ecosystem to a great extent

I think that open source has changed the traditional software ecology to a great extent, bringing the possibility of balancing the interests of various participants in the ecology.

———Gu Jun

ApacheCon is the official global series of conferences of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As a prestigious open source feast, ApacheCon has attracted much attention in the open source community and is also one of the well-known activities in the early days of the open source movement.

As early as 1998, before the establishment of ASF, ApacheCon had attracted participants at all levels to explore "tomorrow's technology" in more than 300 Apache projects and their different communities. Also in this session, developers who developed HTTPD services gathered together and decided to establish the Apache Software Foundation.

ApacheCon is held once a year, usually in Europe or North America. It is an excellent opportunity for Apache developers to communicate, discuss, and meet offline, as well as a rare occasion for sharing ideas and exciting ideas. Through hands-on practice, keynote speeches, actual case studies, training, hackathons, etc., showcase the latest development and emerging innovations of the Apache project.

This year, in order to better serve the rapidly growing Apache users and contributors in the Asia-Pacific region, the first ApacheCon online conference for the Asia-Pacific time zone, the ApacheCon Asia conference, was held online from August 6 to 8, 2021.

In order to let everyone know more about open source and ApacheCon Asia, SegmentFault will interview some Track Chairs or conference lecturers to let you know the stories behind the preparations for the conference and the stories of these experts.

Today, what we bring to you is our interview with Zilliz partner Gu Jun.

The following is the content of SegmentFault's interview with Gu Jun:

Gu

Gu Jun, partner of Zilliz, open source evangelist, member of LF AI & Data Foundation Technical Advisory Committee. In the past 17 years in the industry, he has focused on database and big data technology, and has worked in ICBC, IBM, Morgan Stanley, Huawei and other companies. Gu Jun holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Peking University.

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The story of Gu Jun's first exposure to open source

Oracle acquired Sun in 2008, and the open source database MySQL was acquired by Sun the previous year. As a database engineer, I started to pay attention to the possible changes after the open source project of MySQL was acquired by Oracle. MySQL database was relatively mature at that time, and many Internet companies began to use MySQL in production environments. I had always been a Db2 database engineer serving the financial industry at the time. I was surprised by the establishment of MySQL. From that time I began to gradually invest in the research of open source database software.

Later, I gradually became interested in the open source community and the commercialization of open source software. I think open source has changed the traditional software ecosystem to a large extent, and has brought the possibility of balancing the interests of various participants in the ecosystem.

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When participating in open source and contributing to the Apache community, what are the personal and company gains?

The Milvus open source community is the first open source community I built by myself. In this process, both myself and the startup company Zilliz I belong to have grown a lot.

First, we moved from a closed development environment to a more open model. Everyone can directly face the participants in the community and listen to their feedback and suggestions. This helps us avoid many wrong attempts.

Secondly, through continuous open source operations, we have gradually become an important part of the AI open source ecosystem. Many external software and hardware companies actively contact us for cooperation, which is unimaginable under the closed development mode.

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Gu Jun understands "The Apache Way"?

I sum it up superficially as co-construction, sharing and co-governance.

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Gu Jun and ApacheCon Asia

The Track I’m on this time is Community, and the topic of my speech is How We Build a Global Community of 1K Users in Two Years. In October of this year, the Milvus community will celebrate its 2nd birthday. In less than two years of community building, we have attracted nearly a thousand companies to become users of the Milvus open source project. We shared our experience and lessons learned from it.

I hope my sharing can bring some inspiration to the contributors who want to invest in open source, so as to better build the community and interact with the community.

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About Milvus / Zilliz

Milvus is the world's leading open source vector database system. MIlvus was open sourced in October 2019, and formally passed a technical committee vote in March 2020, and successfully joined LF AI & Data (Linux AI Foundation) as an incubation project. The Milvus project is booming and is widely used in image retrieval, video content analysis, Internet search, recommendation systems, virtual assistants, intelligent customer service, network security, virtual compound screening and gene sequence analysis and other fields. It has more than 1,000 companies worldwide user. In June 2021, Milvus passed the review and vote of the technical committee and became a graduation project of the LF AI & Data Foundation.

Zilliz is an open source basic software company that focuses on the development of unstructured database systems and provides data infrastructure for various AI applications. In November 2020, Zilliz completed a US$43 million Series B financing, setting a record for the largest single round B financing in the global open source basic software field.

Zilliz's recruitment email: [e-mail], long-term recruitment of C++/Go developers, database development engineers, AI algorithm engineers, data engineers, high-performance computing engineers, developer relationship managers and other positions.

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ApacheCon Asia full agenda address:
https://www.apachecon.com/acasia2021/zh/sessions.html