A panel of Platform as a Service and container experts at Collaboration Summit Wednesday didn’t agree on many things – including the relative importance of PaaS and containers, which is more useful for developers, and how the ecosystem will evolve. But they all agreed that the PaaS ecosystem relies on open source to remain relevant and useful.

Here are some of the best quotes from the panel, which included (from left to right in the photo, above) Steven Pousty, Red Hat; Craig McLuckie, Google; Lauren Cooney, Cisco; Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation; and moderator Stephen O’Grady, RedMonk. 

1. “VM’s are the icebreaker for containers. People got used to running on virtualized hardware… and because of that containers can say, “We’re going to run multi-tenant on your machine” and you say, “ok.” Oh, and you’re going to be lighter weight than a VM? Awesome. I’m all about containers now.” – Steven Pousty, Red Hat. 

2.  “This containers revolution is changing the basic act of software consumption. It’s redefining this much more lightweight, portable unit, or atom, that is much easier to manage… It’s a gateway to dynamic management and dynamic systems.” – Craig McLuckie, Google.

3. “If you’re an application developer you should be playing with PaaS now. (Organizations) are doing your developers a disservice if they’re not playing with PaaS.” – Steven Pousty.

4. “If you think about Andreesen’s “software is eating the world” you can take that a step further and say, if you’re not available in the cloud, if you only have APIs, you don’t exist. It’s like not having a website in 1995.” – Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation.

5. “Organizationally… there are massive silos across the board when you look at networking, storage and compute and up the stack, and then where does security fit in? It’s not just like, “oh, I can use a PaaS platform and it’s magic.” There’s all of this underlying stuff that has to go into it and people don’t recognize that.” – Lauren Cooney, Cisco.

6. “I can’t personally separate container and PaaS anymore.” – Craig McLuckie. 

7. “I don’t see how this (PaaS) ecosystem can exist without open source.” – Steven Pousty.

8. “It took convincing to do a cloud service open source – I’m so glad I did… Anyone trying to build a mainstream product is going to be at a massive disadvantage to the open source community.” – Craig McLuckie.

9. “Interoperabily  with existing systems will be extremely important with open source to make sure there’s the right plugins or drivers that can enable applications to run across multiple environments and also support multiple PaaS platforms.” – Lauren Cooney.

10. “The amount of app development that needs to be done is unprecedented. We are never going to have enough app developers to meet the demand.” – Sam Ramji.