Linux, Microsoft and Sun gather at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Where is Apple?

“On April 8-10, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place in San Francisco, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit . The meeting is sponsored by Intel and will be attended by representatives of the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. For the first time, three parties will discuss the future not only of their own OS, but also of the operating system industry as a whole. What will be the result of such a meeting? God only knows. ”The

“ sitting ”meeting will be led by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Participants include Sam Ramji, (Director of Platform Strategy) Microsoft and Ian Murdock (Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing) , Sun. But where is Apple?
Apple holds about 10% of the global OS marketbut they are clearly absent from these negotiations. Developers of Unix-based Mac Os X obviously have something to share? True, participation is possible only by invitation - perhaps they (Apple) were not invited. Perhaps they were invited but decided to refuse and continue to “bend their line further”, which is very similar to Apple.
Also in terms of the event is Al Gillen (IDC Program Vice President, Systems Software) , which will share forecasts of innovations in the world of operating systems and will talk about the impact of the economic downturn on the global OS market.
Edward Screven, (Chief Corporate Architect) Oracle, on the opening day will report on the company's business model built around Linux.
Intel, the host of the event, has delegated Imad Sousou, Director of the Open Source Technology Center , to talk about Mobile Linux and present a program called Moblin State of the Union
A group consisting of Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) , James Bottomley (Novell kernel developer), Joe Brockmeier (openSUSE community manager), Dan Fry (vice president of open systems development for IBM Systems and Technology Group) and Karsten Wade (Fedora) will discuss the role of community contributions in the OS movement.
LWN.net editor-in-chief Jon Corbet, along with Greg Kroah-Hartmann, Andrew Morton and Keith Packard, will discuss the Linux kernel and what will happen in the near future.
This event can be called a closed meeting of the best Linux minds, including kernel developers, marketers, independent software developers , end users, system integrators and several other public organizations. This is the only conference aimed at uniting such different business models, TSZAP initiatives as well as free and closed software, free and paid models for distribution in one forum for such discussions.
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The event will be held in conjunction with the CELF Embedded Linux Conference and the Linux Workshop - The Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop. Detailed information about these events is here .
More information about the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft event is available atLinux Foundation Press Release . This is the third summit that has been held since 2007. In 2007, the main bias was on drivers. In 2008, the theme of drivers was expanded, but also addressed the elasticity of the Internet and virtualization.

What do you think will become the unifying link for the vendors of this meeting this year? And what do you see as the future of the OS market? And yes, what about Apple? - from the author-translator.