After the usual yummy Google Cafeteria lunch...on to the afternoon panels.
Can I first offer a couple of hopefully helpful (if unsolicited) public comments to the organizers of this event? Chris DiBona recently blogged his frustration with participating on panels, and I have to say I agree with him. People like us are asked a hundred times a year to be on panels, and there are definitely better and worse ones. Moderator-driven panels are not nearly as interesting as audience driven panels, but conference organizers keep forgetting this. The energy-level in this room goes up when the audience is allowed to ask the questions and down when the panelists act like "talking heads". Also, cutting general mingle time down in favor of more panel time is a mistake. The interesting thing is the mingling, not the lecture. One reason I love O'Reilly conferences is that they have comprehended these facts. So, in future please allow more mingle time in the schedule (night-time "fun" events are not mingle time...nobody wants to talk about work at them).
The first afternoon panel was about getting more applications onto Linux. Lots of Industry folks (see schedule). There were comments about the usefulness of the Linux Standard Base (they all liked it...but afterall they are on an invited panel ;-) ). There were snipes about still having to "pick a target" when app vendors choose which versions of Linux to validate and support. Lots of questions about how to make money. Quote of the panel was Mike Milinkovich Executive Director of Eclipse.org saying..."If you're a small ISV and your only platform is Linux, it SUCKS being you"...(he did have the good grace to say that he was hoping to get out of the room alive after the comment).
Next panel was the obligatory legal one...this one about GPLv3 and its effect on the Linux ecosystem. Interests (in to GPLv3) included patents, standardization, fragmentation and aggregation such as Linux Foundation. IMHO, there was more than a little pandering to secular interests (adverts for initiatives championed by their employers). I personally asked a question about Open Standards and the need for a definition there, which Andy Updegrove agreed with (no surprise, but it was nice).
At 3:00pm, I had to take a call (it's a miracle my cellphone didn't call me away before now)....
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