Open Source Dinner

One of the VC firms involved with Vyatta organized a dinner of a bunch of open source companies last night. We had Bill Hilf, the VP of open source at Microsoft; Kim Polese from SpikeSource; Simon Crosby, one of the founders of Xen and XenSource; Mike Schroepfer, the VP of engineering for Mozilla; Robert Fanini, the founder of GroundWork; and Scott Dietzen, the CTO of Zimbra. It was a heavy hitting crew. Everybody was in town and geared up for the Open Source Business Conference. I was sitting next to Simon (XenSource) and Robert (GroundWork), and across from Bill (Microsoft) and Mike (Mozilla). The conversation was great. I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store.

Simon and I got engaged in a long conversation regarding AMD (where I worked in a long-ago life) and Intel (where Simon worked). The consensus was that Intel is pretty poorly positioned for the next 12 - 18 months. We'll see what happens when the next round of Intel chips arrives later this year. Simon said the virtualization capabilities of both Intel and AMD's new chips are going to be pretty amazing, paired with Xen.

It was funny watching Bill and Mike discuss browser strategies. I was waiting for the WWF Smackdown to break out, but everybody was remarkably civil. Both of them seemed to have a realistic view of the browser wars.

The big rumor around the table was the Oracle/Sleepycat deal.

Anyway, it was fun to attend. Vyatta was not quite there in terms of announcing anything at OSBC, but I'm sure we'll be attending next year.