San Francisco (CA) — At the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco on April 8-10, 2009, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place. There, sponsored by Intel, will be assembled together the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft representatives. For the first time ever, the three-way group will sit down at a single table to debate and discuss the future not only of their respective operating systems, but also the OS industry in general. What will come from such a meeting? I truly believe that only God knows.
The sit-down meeting will be moderated by Jim Zemlim, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. It will include Microsoft's Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Strategy, and Sun's Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing, Ian Murdock. But where's Apple?

Apple currently holds around 10% of the global OS marketshare, and yet they are notably absent from these talks. Surely the UNIX-based OS X maker has something to contribute? The gathering is by invitation only, so maybe they weren't invited. Or, maybe they were but have chosen not to go — deciding instead to do their own thing (which would not be out of character for Apple).

Also on the agenda is IDC Program Vice President, Systems Software, Al Gillen, who will share new findings on operating system forecasts and who will give a talk about the economic downturn and its impact on the global OS markets.

Edward Screven, Oracle Chief Corporate Architect, will deliver the opening day keynote with the company's business model centered around Linux.

The Host sponsor, Intel, will send Imad Sousou, Director of the Open Source Technology Center, who will speak about Mobile Linux and its Moblin State of the Union keynote and demonstration.

A panel comprised of Jono Bacon (community manager at Ubuntu), James Bottomley (kernel developer at Novell), Joe Brockmeier (community manager at openSUSE), Dan Frye (VP of open systems development at IBM's Systems and Technology Group) and Karsten Wade (of the Fedora Project), will discuss community contributions to the OS movement.

LWN.net's editor-in-chief, Jon Corbet, along with additional panelists (comprised of Greg Kroah-Hartmann, Andrew Morton and Keith Packard of Ted Ts'o), will discuss the Linux kernel and what's coming next.

The event is an invitation-only gathering of the brightest minds in Linux, including core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations. This is the only conference designed to bring together such disparate business models, DRM beliefs, closed and open source initiatives, and free and fee-based models, into a single forum for such a discussion. As the sponsor, it seems that only Intel could go to San Francisco.

The event will be co-located with the CELF Embedded Linux Conference, along with the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop. For more information on this, see Collaboration-summit.

For more information on the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft OS meeting, see the Linux Foundation's press release. This is the third annual summit. See highlights from 2007 and 2008. In 2007, the primary focus was on drivers. In 2008 the drive theme was extended, but it was also about Internet compliance as well as virtualization.

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