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Monday, September 05, 2005

Moving on... Back to Oracle

As most of you have probably heard by now, I left Orbeon a few weeks ago. I'm off to see if I can make an impact at Oracle, a company which has benefitted hugely from Free and open source software. Oracle is definitely ready to commit to open source by dedicating resources and contributing IP. I'm quite sad to leave my great friends at Orbeon where I got used to working with extremely talented people. Change is always hard but change is good.

I'm very excited to re-join Oracle! I met some people at Eclipse World (where I gave a keynote last week) and they couldn't believe somebody was hired at Oracle as the Chief Open Source Evangelist. One attendee told me "Oracle and open source just don't go together". Let's face it; Oracle is known as an active contributor to the JCP. Oracle has also been known as a big supporter of OSS on the consuming side. But the reality is that when it comes to development tools and middleware, Oracle is behind on the giving back side. Well, we are working on that and I am here to change this perception. We have already started with a few Eclipse and Apache projects where we have taken the lead and have been joined by vendors like IBM, BEA, JBoss and Exadel. This is just the beginning. Soon Oracle will be the largest software vendor actively involved with the open source community. I am sure there will be challenges for me at Oracle but I couldn't be more enthusiastic about my role in the company as well as in the OSS community.

Stay tuned!