't Was that time of year again. The east coast Linuxworld show, like last year, in Boston. I have always found it funny that we have the Boston (or New York) show early in the year and the San Francisco one in August. Boy it can be cold.

So the show was quite small, the showfloor had fewer booths than last year, and a few big companies were missing, there was no big HP, IBM or Sun presence. It sounds like there are a few too many Linuxworld events going on across the globe and they want to make a statement by not showing up. Why not just one nice big Linuxworld San Francisco !

Anyhow, the show - I did not attend talks, just met with a number of customers, partners and research analysts. That really is the main reason to go for me. I love getting feedback from our customers and how well (or not) things are working out so we can help address some of this. We have this event called the Linux customer advisory forum and we try to present some of our plans to customers and get feedback in a more open way, get a discussion going. This is extremely valuable, especially if you have something to show in response to prior meetings ! I prefer to make this an interactive discussion event rather than presenting grand ideas and powerpoint slides and the "it's all good" talk. Reality is important and I prefer to listen and react.

At the booth there were a number of presentations, Mike Olson was doing a great job presenting on berkeleyDB and embedded databases. I saw Margo hanging out there as well. We made quite a few announcements on customer success stories on Linux in press releases and local chats. Linux really is in every company these days, large or small, test or mission critical, cluster or single node, small smp or large smp. Everywhere. And most of all, it can handle it. For those that like to hear it again - we are fully committed to this OS. Nothing has changed around our strategy, use of Linux as platform for development and production deployments. It is all still the same, very active and very much alive. If anything, it's growing stronger by the minute!

I believe that one of the biggest things we have to do a better job of is documentation, provide more papers, more information, more configurations we have tested and such online. In many cases, stability issues can be solved through some tuning. So let's work on that ! Actually a lot of this is coming on line real soon.

On another note, there was an announcement also around ocfs2 and how it got merged into the mainline kernel. This just to re-iterate our commitment to Linux and working well with everyone out there. Oracle donates a lot of code back to the community. We are not just users of Linux or other products/projects but actual contributors .

We have a huge developer community for our products. Developers that write products in any form under any license that work well with our very solid database and middle tier applications. In most cases this all just works transparently, or mostly transparently with other solutions out there, as long as it's based on using standard methods to access storage engines. At the same time, we also provide a lot of stuff back to where it belongs, and I can of course talk specifically about Linux. Look at all the QA, all the bugfixing, the feature work, all that stuff is good for us, granted, but also good for the community, other application vendors and so forth.

I have been reading some blog entries by some folks that were involved with Linux at Oracle and now work elsewhere... Sometimes I feel like responding to some of the stuff they now say but it is best to ignore the blabber and just let them rant. One thing I do want to state is that in the Linux team we have many people that have been doing this for years and really are part of the community and understand how things work.

Life is good, having fun, doing the right thing.

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