Oracle OpenWorld 2006 is this week in San Francisco, CA. Best news source I see is on News.com. But there’s more…

From a Java perspective, Oracle is interesting. Beyond databases, Oracle is very much involved in backing and supporting many open source Java efforts, including Grails as announced earlier this year at JavaOne. Also, Oracle JDeveloper 10g IDE is available for free from Oracle now.

Oracle is also interesting from the stand point that much speculation centered around Oracle acquiring JBoss. Of course, JBoss was later acquired by Red Hat earlier this year. Now at this conference, much speculation centers around some kind of Oracle and Ubuntu (Linux) partnership. Maybe. But I don’t see Ubuntu satisfying Oracle as an enterprise Linux platform, like Red Hat. I think Novell SUSE or Red Hat Linux platforms make more sense for Oracle. Novell may be protected by IBM. Red Hat… maybe. We’ll see.

Anyway, Oracle is a key industry player for Java, and will continue to be despite their expansion into .NET and LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python).