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Monday, October 17, 2005

EuroOSCON 2005

I just landed a couple of hours ago in Amsterdam after a rather smooth flight from SFO through Chicago O'Hare. I came here to attend EuroOSCON 2005. I am looking forward to this conference where I will also be speaking on Wednesday and reconnecting with all my OSS buddies. I am sure a lot of people are wondering what Oracle is doing for open source, my presenation will touch on this of course but I will also be at the Oracle booth answering questions. Feel free to stop by if you're around.

posted by Omar Tazi at 3:20 AM
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5 Comments:

  • Omar,

    hope you enjoyed Amsterdam, it's a great city !! you seem to be getting a fair amount of blog spam, just like the rest of us - oh, well!

    Anyway, apparently 10g Express (is this what's called?) does not seem to have particularly won FOSS over.

    from ZDNet
    ------------------------------------

    But Oracle does not appear to understand the benefits of free and open source software, according to Adrian Jones, the managing director of Sleepycat Europe, which makes the open source Berkeley DB.

    "When it comes to the open source market, Oracle still doesn’t get it," said Jones.

    "Oracle is confusing free beer with free speech. There are many reasons why the open source database market is growing so healthily. Price is certainly one reason, but equally important is the fact that the open source vendors are progressively adding functionality to their products, improving product quality and building the community around them," he said.

    ------------------------------------
    IMHO Oracle needs to reach out more proactively, perhaps through yourself, to the FOSS community and develop a Value Strategy which involves them right from the start.

    Hey, isn't it what the Web 2.0 is all about ?

    By Blogger Gianni, at 3:02 AM  

  • Gianni,

    Thanks for being a loyal reader and for posting interesting comments on a regular basis :)

    WRT spam, I hate it but couldn't find the time to take care of it. I delete them occasionally...

    As for the comments by Berkeley DB, I really disagree with them. At OSCON I had a bunch of people come up to me and say that they had just abandoned OSS DBs (primarily MySQL) because their business couldn't risk being down for hours anymore. High availability is something they have to have and their choice was Oracle 95% of the time. And these guys are open source crowds...

    Oracle 10g Express is great for developers who would like to get their project off the ground, when their needs become critical, they can seamlessly (and I mean seamlessly not in a marketing way) migrate to Oracle 10g Enterprise to get the reliability their business requires.

    Finally Oracle is really doing a lot for FOSS, we are huge in Linux (it would be too long to list all the contributions here but I will post a blog entry on this soon), we have built a great product with the Zend folks (Zend Core for Oracle) that's free and open source, we are leading a bunch of Eclipse projects (JSF, BPEL and EJB30 O/R Mapping), we are working with Apache, and the list goes on and on... People label Oracle unfairly as a company that doesn't understand or care about FOSS but they usually missing key information, that's why I was hired to make some noise around our OSS efforts and help Oracle play a more important role in the OSS community down the road, stay tuned!

    By Blogger Omar Tazi, at 11:37 AM  

  • Of course - I guess I'm just advocating more visibility for these efforts... in a way, a poor marketer's shallow view of the world ;-D

    BTW, I never got around to linking you to my comments on your (and other people) hiring by tech corporates, so I'll do that now.

    By Blogger Gianni, at 3:13 PM  

  • Gianni, thanks for the link. I thought your link to Eric Raymond's exchange with the Microsoft recruiter was very funny.

    By Blogger Omar Tazi, at 8:35 AM  

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