In the past decade the OpenEmbedded buildsystem has gained support for pretty much every relevant GUI and IPC technology and has been able to be self hosting for some years now: the buildsystem can (cross)build all its dependencies so it can run on the target as well. This means that developers will never need to touch OE for their work if they can live with the relatively long native buildtimes. If you buy a Beaglebone or Minnowboard you will get a full featured OE built distro pre-installed: Angstrom. As a real distribution with online package feeds it has prebuilt packages of the most popular software and provides the tools to build the missing bits yourself. And if you don't like Angstrom you can install fedora/arch/gentoo on those boards. So why are things like OE and buildroot still needed? This presentation will show why OE is still needed and how Angstrom uses it.
Koen is the lead developer of the Angstrom distribution, a core developer of the OpenEmbedded project. He works for Linaro as the release manager as his day job.
