Ericsson's Santiago Rodriguez

The VP of engineering for SDN and policy control admitted Ericsson took ODL's first release, Hydrogen, and made its own changes, but then realized how hard it was to move those changes into the Helium release and decided to adopt an "upstream first" strategy going forward.
I admired the candid comment from the Ericsson guy about learning that hard way not to create your own version of open source code.
I was a bit of a failure at the beer and cookies event. I drank a glass of wine instead and photographed the cookies instead of eating them. I really wanted the popcorn that was being handed out as well but the line was too long