A who's who of open source software execs and investors. One of the interesting things about the Olliance Group‘s Open Source Think Tank is that it’s so darned collaborative. You’d think that by now open source would have become as cutthroat as the rest of the high-tech industry, but judging from my encounters, that’s just not the case. Maybe it’s because we have more in common in terms of challenges and closed source competitors. As was pointed out on the CIO panel, open source is still a small industry and one that is not yet well known among large Fortune 500 CIOs. When you’re swimming in the middle of it, you can sometimes feel like a pretty big fish, but in reality, it’s still a small pond. Perhaps there’s some irony in the fact that Microsoft’s Sam Ramji attended the event, but there was no one from two of the bigger open source firms Red Hat and Novell. Or maybe it’s the old saw “keep your friends close and your enemies closer!”Nonetheless, it was nice to see so many old friends — definitely a productive and fun event. I’ve posted a few photos to PicasaWeb and below. The photos include investor and uber board member Larry Augustin, Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, VC Philippe Cases from Partech, former VP of Sales from MySQL Mark Burton, and many others. Kudos to Andrew Aitken and the whole Olliance team for putting on a first-class event. Open Source