Chris Hallinan, Director of IoT Sales, Author, Speaker, Instructor, Pilot, Army Veteran

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FORCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show, program services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FORCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FORCY Radio. Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W fourcy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena. Thanks everybody for joining in today. I am Kevin Helenan, and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W fourcy dot com. We're streaming live on talk for tv dot com in addition to Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio, as well as available in podcast after the live show on lots of platforms including YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, and pretty much wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, the remission of the show winning business radio and TV as most of you know that are regular listeners. It's to offer insights and advice, to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to learn best practices, the how twos, the

1:30 what twos, the what not twos, to be challenged and certainly to be inspired by the successes of others. But you know, virtually every successful person I've ever talked to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers. So listen, Well, we all have to get our knie skin once in a while. You hear me say every week, I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it today. My guest is Chris hallenan director of IoT sales, accomplished author, speaker, instructor, pilot, and he's my brother. Special treat for me. Here's his bio. Chris Allen and has over twenty five years of progressive technical and commercial experience in high tech companies. He spent his early years in product development, first as a hardware engineer and then in firmware and software development. Chris has developed a blend of startup and corporate cultures.

2:17 Is a recognized team player, team builder, and team leader. Chris has been involved in the open source ecosystem for two decades, selling and supporting open source solutions. He's currently Director of IoT Sales for a global producer of Linux operating systems for desktop, server, cloud and IoT applications. He's an accomplished author, speaker, and instructor. He's an author of three at least three books, including the popular Embedded Linux book Embedded Linux Primer. He's a private pilot, instrument rated and currently owns flies and maintains on nineteen sixty four Beechcraft Bonanza. He's an accomplished guitar player. Is a longtime Ham radio operator. Is a veteran of the US Army and grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts.

3:00 What a coincidence. He has four grown children and four grandchildren. I'm only at one one in two thirds. He is one brother me and we have two sisters. Chris, welcome to Winning Business TV and radio, and thanks for being here. Well, it's my pleasure and thanks for that great introduction. Yeah, I'm I'm not really that great, but I am the older brother. So pleased to be here, pleased to be in Massachusetts actually and looking at here Florida for sure. So this is a treat for me. When I knew you were common obviously you know the story, but the audience doesn't. I say, hey, I gotta get you on the radio, so on TV now in radio keeps saying that, but we are simulcast all over the place where it's a worldwide audience. So kind of fun. So you grew up in Medfield, mass I'm gonna let you tell people in the audience, and many of whom are not in Massachusetts don't know what that's like.

3:49 Tell us about that upbringing. What's that like? Well? I do cherish the fact that we grew up in a small neighborhood where everybody knew everybody. I mean, our parents knew our friends parents. And it was a different time, right. We could stay out after dark and nobody worried, We could go to our friend's house and our parents knew that you knew the parents, and just a very different time, right, And I missed that. I cherished that, you know, I cherished that that upbringing. We had a lot of fun as kids, and you know it was a small school. My graduation from class I think was one hundred and seventy five kids in high school. So small town, small school. It's not so small anymore. I hardly recognized the place, but I know, but I really, you know, I considered that one of the blessings of my life.

4:34 So so I know the answer to this question, but the audience doesn't. What were your early interests? Oh, gosh, I was interested. I was a geek way way back right. I started playing guitar when I was eleven. We were on vacation in Connecticut and the babysitter, one of the babysitters had a guitar, and it's like, Hey, I want to try that out right, So I've been hacking around at the guitar. I'm not a professional guitar player for that long. But also, as Kevin knows, I was drawn to geeky stuff, tech stuff at a very early age. And I had my hand radio license, my first amateur radio license at the age of thirteen. And you actually have to pass a test on basic electronics theory, and back in those days, you had to pack it, pass a test on proficient resending and receiving Morse code and I remember I took a class in a boy Scout camp or down the cape somewhere, I don't remember where, but I took a signaling merit badge and I chose Morse code, and I kind of learned Morse code the back doorway through that. But it has turned out to be a lifelong passion I still enjoy and I can.

5:43 I can sit here and have this conversation with you in Morse code without pen and paper in my head at thirty words a minute. Thirty words a minute to you would sound like just a buzz, right, So yeah, I've been tinkering with electronics and devices since that early. What many people may not realize is being an extra class radio operator. At no, you weren't thirteen as an extra, but you got your extra sixteen. That's still really young for an extra class. Most of those guys are old farts like us. Now, you know, Yeah, the extra class license requires it's actually quite a difficult test. It requires knowing some advanced theory of electronics and r F electronics and you know, usually that's the kind of stuff you get in first first year, first your college if you're going, you know, pursuing an electrical engineering degree. So I was proud of that accomplishment. You know, I've had that license that it's they've now streamlined things, but it is still the highest class of amateur radio license that they offer. And so you are the youngest of many, or the certainly one of the youngest of many that ever got that license, and people I remember people commenting on it, Oh, well, sixteen, he's got that, So pretty cool. So I also remember a monster mini bike from like the Mad Max movies. Built you built by hanging like a lawn mower engine on the on the crossbar of bicycle.

7:01 Talk about that, and I say that because you were always at the building and creating things. Boy, I haven't. I haven't thought about that for thirty years. But I remember. It was a red bicycle and I this was a horizontal shaft Briggs and Stratton, and it had a little clutch on it, and I basically tied the thing up with ropes and change so that the clutch would drive the tire directly, you know, And it did until the tire, you know, lost all of its rubber and burned out. But that was a lot of fun. I didn't even remember that. I haven't thought about that for thirty years. So here's another one climbing trees to install him radio and tennis. I still actually I know, well nowadays I rent the lift. I have a fifty foot tower at home in Florida, and I rent the lift to get up there. But yeah, I mean so far, I've never broken my leg fallen out of a tree.

7:53 And actually in Florida, I built this. Oh we used to call them potato launchers as we were tags. It's a big piece of PVC tubing, you know that you fill up with air and then you put this little I use an egg shinker or one ounce egg shinker tied to a fishing pole, and once I let it off, the thing will shoot a hundred feet into the air. You know. One time I tried to do that and it broke and it put a hole through the screen enclosure that covers my pool. That hole was there for years. Still a hurricane destroy that puts the wire up in the trade where you needed to be. Yea, yeah, it'll shoot up. Talk about so when you were young, right after high schools, I recall you joined the army. You're in Germany and that's where you further developed your knowledge of an interest in electronics and technology. Talk about that experience. Well, to be honest with you, I don't say this to everybody, but that was the three best years of my life. I met a lot of people and had a lot of fun and it changed me as a person. But yeah, so I wasn't quite ready for college for a number of reasons, and so I decided at seventeen I joined the Army.

9:07 Mom had to actually sign on the dot and mind information. And I tested really high, of course in the electronics in the ASBABS, and they offered me basically my choice of schools, and I took a school that was only one of its kind in Denver. It was called the Army calls it calibration Specialist and the Air Force calls it Female precision Measurement Equipment Labs. And basically what we did we were trained to maintain very complex test equipment like oscilloscopes and signal generators and spectrum analyzers and vote meters and go around to different bases and certify that their boxes were making measurements that were traceable back to what was then called the National Bureau Standards is now called NIST National Institut science and technology.

9:56 We were calibration specials, so we could open up a tectronic and troubleshoot it to the bad transistor and fix it and put this sticker on it that says this is now. You know, when you measure a volt or an home or a frequency, it's traceable back to our national standards. And the coolest thing about that has experiences it was mobile. Our labs were mobile, so we got to travel in this big loop every six or eight weeks and stay in hotels and eat in restaurants and basically we were immersed in German society. We didn't have to do that. It's the regular army thing, you know, I mean it was. It was just such a fun time. So I think I should know the answer to this, but I don't. Were you in uniform, yeah, we were still newful okay, but I never saw a gun, right. And every twice a year, the command that was called USURER at the time, US Army Europe that they would call these alerts where all the soldiers would get on their backpacks and get their rifles in their weapons and their aids and whatever and go out field, set up tents and pretend and play war games. Well, we would go to the motor pool and grab a van and head out of town. We didn't have to play those games, which was kind of We always used a joke we weren't really we weren't regular army. We were. We were cheated as such too.

11:16 So so that fueled further fueled your passion for technology. Right, So now let's fast forward just a little bit. You get out of the army. Your your first it looks to me, your first professional job. My memory is good, but it's not that good. It was your career, not mine. Ray Com your first professional professional position, and I just want to know describe the work and how you got that job. I think it's relevant. Yeah, so ray Com was actually in Colorado. So my first job probably not on resume, probably not on my LinkedIn because the company along gone. It's probably Oliverant. But I ended up in Seattle, the story of itself, and I found a job at a company that was called Northern Radio Company. It was a small all thirty or forty people operation, and they manufactured shipboard radios for commercial ship shipping ships. Right, and I was very you know, I signed on as a as a as a technician, to test the boards as they would come off the assembly line. And you know, small story, that is where I met the mother of my children.

12:24 She was one of the assemblers. But I quickly gained the admiration of the engineering staff and they were good enough to mentor me and teach me. And that's where I began to learn about microprocessors and computer hardware and computer software. Because these radios had for its day, this was back in this was nineteen eighty one, so for its day, these had a synthesized RF generator, so you could plasically plug in any frequency right, any frequency want, and it was a microprocessor control synthesizer. And so that's where I kind of got my start in the you know, sort of microprocessor computer technologies, both the hardware and the and the and the software sider. It was an interesting job. So you've actually spent a lot of time on hard on the hardware side of things, I know, you know, that's after a while, it was it was software and development. But you're also at kind of a particular time. And I know this is going to sound kind of preachy and whatever. Not preachy, but I don't know, romantic, but you're you're at a time when a lot of stuff was being developed, including very important pieces of equipment that made networking possible. Talk about that. Oh absolutely, you know, so in the days I can make people. I can make a hardware engineer who laugh his head off right now when I tell them the technology that I worked on. I used to develop boards and products that had

13:54 these programmable chips on them. And the programmable chips like had twenty four logic blocks. That doesn't matter what that means. Today's programmable chips have twenty four thousand. You know, you can build an entire microprocessor and an entire Wi Fi router on a chip and it has hundreds of thousands of these logic elements. And I was working on the very beginnings of that technology that had just a you know, a few and we'd use them for state machines and for driving little bits and pieces of hardware. I remember so fast forward to Raycom Systems. That was the first time I ever had an email address. It was before I want to say it was before Windows three. That was like before al Gore invented the Internet. Yeah, that's right, and I think it I might have had a darker Internet address for a brief period of time during that period. We were working on a darker program at that time.

14:54 But but yeah, that was like nobody had emails, nobody. There was no such thing as the World Web and a browser at in those dates days, and the PCs were just coming online as a technology. So I've I've kind of lived through that whole and that's fascinating too, and that whole technical you know revolution, I mean, one hundred years ago is the industrial revolution. This last sixty you know, forty sixty years has been the technological revolution, and it continues right now. We're moving into industry for dot oh and digitization of every process under the sun. And you know, it's just it's been amazing to be a partner of that and to watch that evolved, and I can't imagine where it's going. Well, hold that thought. We're gonna come back to that. We're gonna take our first commercial. We'll be back in about sixty seconds with Chris Allenan. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helena on W four CY Radio. That's W fourcy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. All Right, this is Roger mcgwinn. And you're listening to four Y Radio. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well,

16:26 now it's your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com. Call five six one five zero six four zero three one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now. And now back to winning business Radio with Kevin Helena for ending exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helena. We're back again with and it is a treat my brother Chris halenan very professional, very accomplished Chris. This is a big question. You can take it any direction you want. What are some of the most important lessons I don't mean technologically, I mean in terms of business and experience and getting jobs, leaving jobs, whatever you want, but more from a business case during those early early years, most important lessons learned. Well, let's focus it. I'll answer the question this way. First, is career development. Right, So I'll just say it publicly. I never completed a college degree, and I had to work a little bit harder. I spent many years doing night school

17:59 with the family of two of the group two kids that grew to a family of four, which is six of us. Right, took all the core courses for engineering and physics and calculus and electronics and all that, but I never actually finished the degree. I just ran out of steam doing it at night, and family demands just became too great. But one thing that I have learned over the course of my career is that if you really want to advance your career and move forward, you need to limit your time at every company. So I think the longest, the longest stint I've ever done at any one company was six years, and that's pretty much by design effect. If you look at my LinkedIn program, at six years here, six years or six years here, you learn, you become accomplished, you know, you succeed, and then you the best way to advance to get more responsibility and of course more salary that comes with it more compensation. You need to be prepared to move to you know, to a new job. And I you know, a lot of people hate change, and I've you know, in my life, I've gone through a lot of changes, and I don't hate change. I look at change as a unique opportunity for a new chapter.

19:11 Right. It's like it's I don't have the fear of the unknown. Sure, I have trepidations with the unknown, but but I've done that over the course of my career and it has paid off. You know. I'm I'm in the latter stages of my career now. In fact, I'm looking forward a couple of years or two to that big our word and starting to put things in place for that. But but that's that's something I've done, and I've done kind of intentionally. I've been lucky. I've never been in the layoff situation. I've always been working, you know, I've always done it on my own terms. And that's just pure luck. I mean, there's a lot of people to get in situations that where they can't control. But that's something that I would I would encourage and I do. There's a few people in my company that are young and kind of scarly in their career, and I encourage them not pay, don't leave the company. But if you really want to advance your career, spend a few years here, learn whatever you can, and then move on and learn some new things and new challenges. So that's just the way I've looked at it. Cool So you were also self employed, sort of overlapping some of that, and that's twice.

20:15 The first one I see is two thousand to two thousand and seven, and again that's probably some consulting, etc. Talk talk about that. What made you decide to do that and what kind of work did you do? Well? What made me decide to do that, I probably won't talk about. It was I got into a job that I wasn't really satisfied with, and I said, you know what I would like to try in my career self employment. So in the old proverbial you know line, I quit my job and hung up a sign that says engineer for hire. And that was in the dot com boom, and I named the company. It was a Massachusetts corporation. I named it dsfour dot com. At the at the time, telecommunications was one of the big industries and at the time, a DS three, which happens to be this technical designation for a high speed connection or today's standards it would be ancient, and so I figured the next big technology would be DS four, So I named my company dsfour dot com. And basically what I did was I helped companies to build small in bed we call them embedded systems. What's an embedded system? You know, it's a small, often resource constrained device that often has a single purpose. You know.

21:33 A good example would be a GPS unit. Remember in the day when you could buy individual GPS is for your car. Now we don't need them because they're either built into the car or built into our phone. But that's a perfect example of an embedded system. So I'd helped companies. I had a broad expert expertise in a wide range of technologies from the bottom of these systems, the hardware to the full stack of software that runs on them, and the and the know how to put all that together in a small form factor. So I was getting paid good money back then you're doing for doing that job. And yeah, what was the hardest part of that consulting and being self employed, Well, the hardest part is you work out a lot more than forty hours a week because first of all, your clients think you know everything, and so you have to you know, you have to do well.

22:21 We do pretty much, Yeah, we do. I do. I can almost say that now though I would never do that. In fact, the more I learned, the more I know how much I don't know? But yeah, so you're you're doing a lot of work to you know, to discover and learn and research you know, the methods that you need to make the you know, make the solution. And the other thing is you have to be a marketer. You know, you have to be you know this, devote a certain times time of your week to find clients because that's what keeps the bills paid. Ideally, you have a backlog, you have a client's waiting for your time as you you know, free up. And mostly I was successful through my network, you know, around you know the area here of in finding in finding clients, what was the most Yeah, for sure, what was the most rewarding part? I won't be I'll be honest with you. That was a very good pay. Uh. You know, it was tough work, but it was top dollar and I made a lot of money in those years. And uh, and you know I met a lot of people, you know, I even around this area. If you look at my LinkedIn profile. I probably have five thousand people in my network, and I'll bet you I've met a pretty substantial proportion of those people, or you know, some of them. I haven't, But you know, I was connected to the local Motorola office here, which is no longer called Motorola. It's gone through two different name changes since I was working with those guys. They make chips, you know, microprocessor chips for one thing,

23:55 and you know, just a lot of different groups in the area, the different distributor and the people who sold these chips. You know, just knew a lot of people, and that, you know, helped me to keep keep the you know, jobs coming in. All right. Then you started to move over to software and development monte Vista mentor graphics, and then you also moved over to what we like to call the dark side, sales side. Now you were a technical resource and sales. But talk about making that transition. Was it intentional? Accidental? Purely, purely accidental. It is a matter of fact I mentioned this Motorial office here. I don't know what their status is today. It's been quite a few years there in Wooburn, and if they're still there, it's a company called NXP and I knew a lot of the people, the sales people there and the faes, and the fae there actually introduced me to someone at Montevista, knowing that they were looking for an FAE at monte Vista who was really at a deep knowledge and embedded Linux and all things Linux. And I met the v vice president of sales and he made me an offer and I spent. I ended up spending six years there, and that was a good run. I really enjoyed that.

25:14 It was a startup. In fact, Monavius the Linux was founded in nineteen ninety nine. They were bought out by a semiconductive vendor. They're still around under that name, but totally different company now, but they were essentially a pioneer in commercializing embedded Linux. For now, I'm going to get technical for non X eighty six architectures. What's x at six architecture? The computer you're sitting in front of right now, if it runs Windows, it's got an Intel X eighty six chip on and ighty six is a microprocessor architecture. But there are other architectures, most notably ARM. I should remember what that stands for, but I don't. But ARM has just taken over the world in high performance power computing. So they're the king of like every router you buy. You know, a lot of routers you buy are gonna have most I would say most get best buy. For example, they're gonna have armed chips in not X six. So monte Vista was a pioneer in commercializing embedded Linux solutions for non x eighty six architectures. So that's what they did, and we were around for ten years. We never hit it out of the ballpark, so to speak, as a company. It was very early days in the in the in embedded Linux business, but it was a great run.

26:33 I've got lifelong friends from that, you know, from that engagement. So in fact, it's just out in Austin a few weeks ago and at dinner with one of them. So so we're going to come back to what Lynx is. But for now my computer runs M one. Just don't tell anybody, right, Oh so the minds an M two. I love it. So An Fae, you were not You're on the sales side of the of the house, so you're customers commissioned resiz commissions. I supported a sales account manager essentially, so we would be he or she was doing the sales, the business, closing business, getting in fun of people. You would come out as a technical resource. And yet my job is get a technical win, get the technical win. You said the words, right, you took the words right out of my mouth. That was my job, get the technical win. Yeah. So there another couple of companies there, and then some more self employment which is going on before we take the next break, which will be about two minutes. You're currently at a company called Canonical.

27:37 If I'm pronouncing that correctly, you are talk about the work that you do now. So yeah, so I joined about a year ago. I am the director of Biot Sales, as you mentioned when you on that great introduction you made at the start of the show, and I basically sell one of the world's most popular embedded Linux up reading systems that specifically optimized for the IoT market. And unless you are born, you know, unless you live under a rock, you probably have heard the term IoT Internet of things, right. I mean, there are so many things in our daily lives that are example of IoT ring doorbells, and you know, uh, you know, devices like that that are ubiquitously connected, you know, always connected to the Internet. Those are Internet of Things devices. And the coolest thing about this job is because Canonical as a company is not so well known, but our product, which is called you Buntu, you Be You n to you Buntu Linux is probably the most popular Linux on the planet. And I get to talk to companies that are household names, people that you have in, Companies that whose appliances you have in your kitchen, whose technology you have in your automobile, Who whose technology are in you know, airplanes and farm equipment and retail restaurant chains and you name it. You know, I don't want

29:07 to go and you know, yeah, you know, talk about prietary things, but everyday customers, you know that household names, and it's really cool to be involved with with with those companies. Right all right, we're gonna take our second break now and we'll come back and talk about IoT and you've kicked this around, embedded Linux, what linux is. We'll come back in just about another sixty seconds. We'll be right back. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helena on W four CY Radio. That's W fourcy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on the Winning Business Radio. Hey, this is Elliott Lewis of Holland Oates and you're listening to W four C Y Radio. The YP dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews. Or if your car breaks down, you can use the ypapp to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night.

30:22 While it has great local coupons for all sorts of things in your area, no matter what, when or where. If you're looking for something, YP local search can help you find it. So go to YP dot com or download the app to search local, find local, and save local. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helena, presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helena. We're back with Chris hallinan director of IoT sales, accomplished author, speaker, instructor and pilot and he's my brother from the same mother. Talk about I don't get to say that a lot. Talk about define for the audience. Now non technical business audience. What embedded Linux is perfect, I'll start with Linux itself, because embedded in just a special case. But okay, Linux is an operating system exactly. It does the exact same functions as Windows ten for example, right, or Windows eleven or whatever you happen to be using Windows. Yeah, iOS is an operating system.

31:42 The thing about Linux is that it is. It is what we call open source. Now, what is open source? The best way I can describe it to tell you what it's not. Microsoft produces a number of really nice packages, software packages. Windows eleven is their just operating system. They produce Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, etc. Those are what we call closed source software programs or proprietary software programs. You cannot look at the software, at the source code that makes those up. They're controlled solely by Microsoft. In contrast, open source projects like Linux operating system are controlled by no one in a commercial sense. There's no company that owns the rights or controls the destiny or open source software. And it's a fascinating movement.

32:35 Gosh, I wish you could remember the book. I will in a minute. It's a fascinating movement and its started, you know thirty some odd years ago, twenty five someone years ago, and it has grown immensely. Most every company on the planet is using some sort type of open source, and open source is freely downloadable. You don't have to pay for it. You can modify it for your own use. You can redistributed if you want to. You can look at the source code. It's it's developed by a community of like minded people that could be and usually are spread all around the world. So now let's talk about Linux and specifically what Linux is. Linux just happened to through a bunch of circumstances that went the right way, become the most popular operating system outside of the Microsoft Windows world. And you got everyone that can hear my voice has touched Linux in some way. For example, Linux is the length is the operating system that powers the Worldwide Web. Okay, who uses Linux? Google is a Linux house. When you interface with Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, we'll get back to Amazon to a special case. IBM McDonald's NASA, Netflix. Right, those are just ones that come off the top of my head. Every automobile you step into modern automile today has got Linux under the hood. It's everywhere, It's in your

34:06 home, routers, it's in your coffee makers, it's in your you know, you know, going to best Buy, and half the products in there, three quarters of are going to be running some version of Linux. So it has become immensely popular, partly because it's decentralized and companies, you know, are not beholden to any other company for its future. And it's you know, support, etc. And it just has it's taken over the world. And embedded Linux is simply an application of Linux that's usually a little bit smaller and runs on resource constrains constrained devices, often devices which have no human interface or very minimal ones, likely even interface on your microwave oven, right, you know, no keyboard and screen in the traditional sense of the word.

34:55 And and and it's which you can move with the book. It'll come to me. But yeah, it's open sources of movement, and Linux is probably the most visible and most popular products to be produced by this open source software movement. So, work product that's written in Linux, can it be copywritten? Can it be proprietarily protected? Linux cannot. Linux has been licensed by what we call a viral license, and by viral license, Linux is copyrighted. But there are probably ten thousand or more copyright holders. But it's copyrighted under a very specific license that happened to be designed here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that license is viral. It says that if you distribute this software, it must be distributed with this license, and therefore the downstream users of it are bound to the condition of that license. And it's what we call a copyleft license. That means it gives the user the freedom to to have it, to modify it, to examine it, to change it, to redistribute it. So it's a viral license. So no, there's no possibility that anyone could take Linux. They would have to convince you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of copyright holders to change and they would That would

36:29 never be even physically possible. But the code in the keypad of my microwave, that process is that copyrightable. So that's a good question. And I am not a lawyer, but I do know a little bit about copyright. A particular arrangement of things can be copyright right, like art, like a poet, like a book, like a song. And it's very likely that an arrangement of software and hardware bits inside of a microwave could be copyrighted, but copyright does not necessarily imply proprietary. It often does, But there are plenty of copyrights, like the Creative Commons is a very very you know, you'll see that, Oliver, Wikipedia is creative Creative Commons copyright and it's it's a permissive copyright license. So all right, you mentioned Amazon as a unique case, thank you. Yeah. So, so Amazon started out life as a couple of servers, you know, in a garage somewhere, selling books, and those servers were running Linux. And as the business grew and it was successful for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is the timing was right. The Worldwide Web was becoming a big thing and bigglehead access and they could get online and order a book. I remember well,

38:02 I think one of the first years, I spent a ton of money on books as part of my consultancy at the time, and at the end of the year, they sent me this tumbler, this Amazon tumbler, right, because I was such a great customer, imagine that, you know, I spent them easily three thousand dollars on books in literature in one year, and they sent me a tumbling I think can happened today. As the business grew, they moved. They grew from like two computers running this service to two hundred computers running this service, to two thousand computers running this service, all running Linux, to twenty thousand computers running the service, and god only knows God on Amazon what the final them what they run today. They have multiple data centers around the world, but essentially Amazon is a company that's run on this giant, worldwide, world class cluster of Linux PCs, of ordinary PCs running Linux. And what a lot of people don't know is one of the bigger revenue contributions that Amazon has every year is they actually have what we call a cloud service, so they you can, what's a good example, Twitter runs as a cloud service, so you know, you know, all of the all of the data and and and the you know, the interaction from the user is managed on a remote computer somewhere out in the cloud. They

39:37 call it the cloud. And Amazon, you know, having these twenty thousand or one hundred thousand, one of the numbrous computers, they had a lot of spare computing capacity, so they decided to take that spare computing capacity and they created essentially the public cloud business with this spare computing capacity, and they were renting out computer capacity. I use it once. I was in monte Vista and I had to go overseas to make a training course, and I actually put together a package so that each of the people in the class could use an Amazon Compute cloud because it required a lot of compute power to run this little class I was running, and I couldn't count on the fact that they'd come with laptops could run it. So I actually used configured twenty four of these Amazon computer compute systems and the class would log into those and do all their work there. So they rent not only storage, but compute resources, compute time, and the business has grown to this just enormous. They have dozens and dozens and dozens of services. I have lost track on what they zillion resellers of it as well. Yeah, and all running on spare capacity on these giant farms of ordinary PCs running Linux operating system. So right, So, last couple of questions. You're on the advisory board of the YUKTO or YUCTO project, and that's a giveback. What is that? Yeah,

41:09 get back, that's something you do to support that community. Yes, yes, yes, I was employed for a company called Mentor Graphics and I kind of inherited the role. But but yeah, So the Yakto project. Yakto is some kind of atomic particle or I don't even really know what it means. But the project is an open source project that helps people build Linux operating systems for their specific gadget. Right, whatever the gadget might be. You know, whether it's a Wi Fi router or a ring doorbell or any of a million other things. Right, a printer, a three D printer.

41:55 I'm working with one company that's making a lobster cutting machine. They're they're in Canada. Yeah, they cut the clause before you get to eat either. Yakto helps people build build Linux if they want to do it themselves. And yakto also was adopted by all the major chip vendors Intel has made. Intel was one of the founding members. They put a lot of money into the Acto project. NXP Semiconductor, which used to be Motorola and then was Freescale and now was NXP and others the arm ecosystem have contributed to the y Octo project, but it is a community driven project. That makes help make helps make it easier for people with not a lot of resources to build a demonstration prototype, proof of concept gadget with an Linux operating system running on All right, we're gonna switch gears. We're gonna talk about your other passion.

42:52 We talked a little bit about music. You're better than you say you are. But every time we get together as a family, you and your boys have guitars and you know, always entertaining everybody and we all sing along. But you're a pilot. How did you get into flying? And I've got a couple of other questions I think the audience will appreciate, but how did you get into flying? Originally? Okay, so I like this. One of my favorite jokes is, you know, in a party, cocktail party full of fifty people, how do you know who the pilots are in the room? They're gonna tell you? So answered that way. No, this is really this is really true. I was on a business trip. I was in Atlanta. It was late at night. I was watching TV, which is something I haven't done in years and years and years, and up comes this AD one eight I can fly, and I called was bored called nineteen ninety didn't think anything of it. Two and a half months later, I get a letter from believe it or not, Spencer Airport, which is just five miles west of which, Massachusetts, a little old Spencer, and with an invitation to come down and take a twenty five dollars introductory ride.

44:07 So I did that, and I met this gentleman who is someone who I admire as a person and as a flight instructor to this day. His name is ed Urbanowski and he still works in the business. And he took me up for my first ride, and I couldn't get the grin off my face. So I said, Okay, we're going to figure out how to do this. You know. I got a family of six and trying as making okay money then in those days, but nothing wasn't knocking to get on the ballpark. But so I signed up for lessons, and a year and a half later I became a private pilot. And over that time I have owned four different airplanes. I've kind of moved up the pecking order, if you will, in the airplanes, and anyone that knows aviation appreciates that the airplane an owning today. The beachcraft Bonanza is kind of the king of the single engine family of airplanes. It's retractable gear, high performance, you know, three hundred horsepower, go fast, go high type of an airplane. So it's it's it's the top of the tier before you would move, say to a twin engine, propeller driven plane. And it's been a big part of my life. It's a big part of my social life. Many of my friends are pilots or have been pilots. As part of that, I've also lost a couple of good friends, one of whom was the owner of that Spencer Airport. But yeah, it's been a it's been a big part of my life and it's a it's a passion that I will always always have.

45:38 And you're in the middle of a project. You're building a van's RV fourteen A. People that know airplanes will know what that is. But the dirty little secret, So I did I am? I have the project in my workshop. I think I bought it in August at at the Oshkosh EAA flying in Oshkosh, Wisconsin every year, which just happened a couple of weeks ago this year. And yes, I bought a I bought a partial kit. They call it the Infanagi kit, and I began to work on it, and I didn't own a plane at the time, and I spent you know, many weekends and evenings in my shop putting it together. So I have the horizontal stabilizer, the vertical stabilizer, the rudder, and I got the elevator mostly put together. And then I did something really stupid. I went out and bought this bananza. And I haven't done any work on it since, so I don't know that I will continue. It's a decision I haven't made yet. I may sell it. I may contain valuable to sell.

46:40 Somebody would buy that. Yeah, yeah, it's it most certainly has value. But but yeah, just to be fair to the audience, especially to the audience that may be builders, I'm not a builder. I can't I can't put that label online. I can't wear that hat a T shirt. Oh that's that's fair. So a couple of last questions, who in the listening and viewing audiences should reach out to you? And why? Thank you appreciate that opportunity if you are a developer building products for this vast world of Internet of things, right, which so, and I'll comment on what that means in a minute, you know, and you're looking for a super secure solution with over the year firmware updates and you know, uh, you know, ready to ready build off the shelf operating system for that environment. We there's there's there's no competition for what we are product called Ubuntu Core. But let me let explain what people are doing today, this IoT, this whole IoT think there's this I mentioned at the very early part of our conscious of timement, just trend to digitize everything, and another buzzword called industry for dot O. And these industries are now putting in these processes, these measurement devices, like retail chains, the ones you know and love, the fast food restaurants and restaurants. They're putting in these computers to measure every single measurable thing

48:12 about that operation and then sending all that data up into the cloud. And then data scientists are crunching all that data to figure out how to make their process is more efficient, how to imcruse profits. And that is across every industry. Okay, And the other thing that's hitting really big is artificial intelligence machine learning. And I'm not afraid of AI like others might be it's already in our lives, right, I mean, you know, AI is going to be just an amazing technology for a lot of different things. If you've played with Chat DPT, if you haven't played with chat GPT, google it and give it a try it. We'll write a song for you, a poem, and do a lot of other things. But that's what's driving.

48:55 So if you're involved in that industry for Doto and digitization of your processes and your factories, your stores, your your restaurants, that's that's where we play. We're an enabler of that technology. Last question, how do people best reach out to you? Well? Good question. So LinkedIn is probably the best, the best bet for for publicly if you just search for Chris Actually, if you just search for Christopher hallin an UH and throw the word Linux in there, I'm probably the first hit and you'll probably find my LinkedIn profile and I accept virtually every connection, uh mostly and uh, And that's probably the best way to reach me from a public point of view. Excellent.

49:40 Well, this has been fun for me. I hope it's been good for you. I really appreciate you taking the time, and it's been fun for me too. I was a little nervous when you first asked me to do this. What do I know? But I guess I do know a few things, and I'm old enough to know a few things, old enough to forget a few Thanks, but thank you for the opportunity. Of course, of course, thanks for being here. Thanks everybody for watching and listening. This is a show about business and business challenges. Often. If you've got concerns about the growth of your company, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn at Winning Business Radio. You can drop me a note Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com is one of my several email addresses. Our company is Winning Incorporated. With part of Sandler Training, we say we developed sales teams at the high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors.

50:28 We're not right for everybody, but maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you as always every single week to produce our an engineer want thank you one for another job well done. Be sure to join us next week That will be Monday, August fourteenth for another fun and interesting guest. Until then, this is Kevin Helena. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host Kevin Helena. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available our Talk for podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four p m. Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four c Y radiowfourcy dot com.

51:12 Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in Business with Kevin Hallinan and Winnie Business Radio