As promised, after individual presentations at last week's CommunityOne I brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel.  (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!)

Although the panel itself wasn't recorded, immediately after it concluded, the five of us headed to the make-shift podcast studio we had set up at the event and recorded the following discussion.  Listen at your peril!

My Discussion with the panel (44:08)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

No glasses? No facial hair? Get in the back.
Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora;  Glynn Foster (standing), OpenSolaris 

Some of the topics we tackle:

• How the gentlemen balance the needs of the community with the needs of their corporate parent.
• Working with upstream providers.  Is the heat Ubuntu gets on this subject justified? Karsten's mantra (Glynn, a former GNOME director, also offers a perspective from the upstream)
• Shout-outs to Debian
  
• Governance and how each of the distros handles it (the community/corporate split and who picks the members)
• In the last third of the podcast we head off in to the realm of the philosophical and address Free vs. Non-Free software, the "Vocal Minority," Richard Stallman, mini-Stallman's and all things holy.