I wasn't really supposed to be there yesterday. The open source collaboration summit in San Francisco is a place where the Linux Foundation brings people together to speak candidly about the state of the penguin and its surrounding ecosystem. As such, the press is only really welcome on the first day, where statements are prepared.
When the press leaves, the gloves come off, and people discuss their real problems. I don't want to get anyone fired for their candid discussions. Thus, I will instead relate some anonymous quotes, or paraphrases, of some of the conversations I was involved in, and some that I overheard.
Understand, going into this, that none of these things are bindingly true. They're simply the snippets I overheard, in various forms. Take them all with a big grain of salt.
“Xen hypervisor is a piece of.... (omitted). I asked them if they had any documentation, or any internal documentation I could read. Nope. Their documentation is ..... (omitted).” This fellow said he prefered KVM and VMware, though he admitted that VMware was expensive. The biggest take-away from this event, for me, was that Xen is effectively dead to the Linux world, going forward. KVM is soon to be the standard, with VM Ware holding firm as the super professional choice for virtualization.
“How would we do that?” A Canonical employee asking how they could possibly put a more modern Eclipse in their repositories. I believe they have 3.2 in there now
“I am here to find out how to support my device in Linux.” Said by numerous peripheral manufacturers, looking to bring more linux drivers to their devices.
“Talk to Greg,” common response to driver seekers. Greg Kroah-Hartman was in attendance.
"All packaging systems suck, except for Gentoo's." A paraphrase of a lengthy discussion between Linux devs and users, all of whom agreed that supporting apps over time with RPM, Debs or anything outside of Gentoo, is really a pain in the butt. This is because updates don't trickle dependencies out to everything they touch.
"I need Share Points..." Said by folks discussing what enterprises need from desktop Linux.