Since OpenedHand was acquired by Intel I worked with few customers. The biggest one was Bug Labs Inc. with which I spend lot of time on hacking Poky Linux and OpenEmbedded to make their BUG devices prosper in hacking community.
Thanks to developers there Java land is not so strange for me (not that I started to like it) and I know which projects exist in that area. Many of changes done for BUG landed in OpenEmbedded metadata and helped other projects. Last release of Poky ‘pinky’ (stable branch which we used with R1.4) was done due to out improvements and bug fixes (we got credit on them). It was great time and I really enjoyed it.
The open source companies have this nice feeling — developers work on code to make it better and better (as other people look at code) and are friendly to own employees and contractors.
What next? My first job where my experience from OpenEmbedded will be used in a project which does not derive from it. Yes — no OpenEmbedded, no Poky Linux. But it will be GNU/Linux still and still ARM architecture.
In 3 weeks from now I will work for Canonical as Foundations OS Engineer. The goal is to make Ubuntu/ARM fly on supported devices (armv7a only). This will be full time job but I hope that will have possibility to do some OE related things from time to time.