What is the biggest impact open source has had on the enterprise to date?

While I think most people would say the biggest impact open source software has had on the enterprise is to save them money, I think the biggest impact has been on the developers. Not only do developers have lots more tools and software solutions available to them but they are part of a bigger community. I think it affects the way they work, their career, their happiness, companies like Kaplan are using open source as a developer retention tool!

When your contributors request code to be checked in, what policies and formats (diligent QA processes) does one follow to ensure that the code checked in does not contain any backdoors or hooks?

We review the code and the committers in our OpenLogic Expert Community review the code. So far the contributions have been pretty straight forward. Do you think companies are trying to submit backdoors into open source? I think you are overestimating them!

Do you think that most IT people would consider open source first, and it's only the business people within companies that push them away? Or are there still IT skeptics?

I think there are still IT skeptics but most people who have used it at all are fans. There are some big fans on the business side too!

Can we get a count of how many attendees are already using open source software? And what they are using?

I can't (technically) but I can tell you that every enterprise we have worked with is using open source software. And when we ask them what they are using and then run OSSDiscovery (http://ossdiscovery.org) we find they are off by a factor of 3-10x! So if they have a list of 10 open source software projects that they are using, Discovery finds that they are using 100. (And they aren't surprised.)

The oscensus.org scan which you mentioned suggests that many enterprises are unaware they're even using OS. Jonathan Schwartz recently blogged in much the same vein. Do you really see that at OpenLogic? Enterprises that think they're using none?

Enterprises usually know they are using open source software. And they usually realize that they don't know how much they are using. But it's embarrassing to admit that - even if everybody else is in the same boat! That's why we open sourced OSSDiscovery - so people could run it for themselves and see what they are using. (We have a webinar next week to show them how to use it.)

Is the whole services revolution (where infrastructure, applications and god-knows-what runs in the cloud) having a negative impact on open source adoption in the enterprise, i.e. are users opting to outsource rather than build it themselves?

Whether they outsource it or build it themselves, they often end up using the same solutions; almost all with lots of open source software components.

Do you think major commercial players like IBM, HP, Google and Novell are doing enough to promote the development of open source software? All of these vendors benefit substantially by having open source software available to them but are they doing enough to foster the continued development of open source software?

I think sometimes the vendors are in an arms race to show who can say they contribute the most to open source. Reality is that they all use a lot of open source, they all employ developers who work full time on open source software and they've all made code contributions. I think about 75-80 per cent of open source software community members receive a salary from a company to work full time on open source software. That said, I think they are continuously learning how best to work with the community - I've been spending a lot of my time lately helping the open source community help their employers figure out how best to work with the community.

Do you think line-of-business applications will be a big growth area for open source in the future? What other open source applications do you see growing in popularity for use in the enterprise?

I do - I think we saw open source software start out with the network edge (web servers, print servers, etc) and migrate to the data center and now it's moving into the desktop and business application space.

Novell claims their November 2, 2006, agreement with Microsoft has helped push forward adoption of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in major commercial customer accounts. And having just attended Novell's BrainShare I can see that the technical cooperation between Novell and Microsoft is starting to bear fruit. Was the knee-jerk reaction of the purists and fanatics worth all of the rhetoric that ensued? And if not, why has Red Hat refused to even consider such an agreement with Microsoft? It seems that they lost out on having a powerhouse marketing partner, like Microsoft, driving business their way.

"Was the knee-jerk reaction of the purists and fanatics worth all of the rhetoric that ensued?" Absolutely. The open source community needs the purists and fanatics to keep us straight. That said, the world is not black and white and business is not always evil. Also, businesses are using combinations of open source and proprietary software in very effective ways. So if the Microsoft agreement brings more customers to Linux, good. If some open source developers protest the patent agreement, good too. (Now hopefully nobody quotes just one part of this answer!)