On Wednesday this week, I attended Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, CA. Here are bits of news and observations I encountered from Oracle and Sun keynotes and more…

From Sun’s keynote by Jonathan Schwartz:

• Solaris/OpenSolaris has surpassed 6 million licenses issued (or downloads). I wanted to clarify but Jonathan canceled his scheduled Q&A with the press.

From Oracle’s keynote by Larry Ellison:

• Oracle continues to push grid computing using clustered Linux server environments. Example: Yahoo! is an Oracle customer that was primarily used as a chief Yahoo developer talked about their commitment to Linux (and moving away from BSD). This does beg the question: What does this mean for Yahoo’s partnership with Microsoft. Afterall, just looking at Yahoo Mail beta, you can see Yahoo is using Exchange for example. I guess we’ll see.

• Oracle wants to take the lead in encouraging the full integration of an “unbreakable” Linux by encouaging all its customers, partners to fully participate in the Linux community. In this context, Oracle and Larry was pushing Linux 2.0. But what this really means remains to be seen.

• Larry introduces “Oracle Linux” which will re-purpose the Red Hat Linux kernel and some of the wrappings that strip out all the Red Hat-specific trademarks, optional features, etc. As part of this, Oracle is offering a $99/yr per PC service and support for former Red Hat customers who convert to this “Oracle Linux”, which will include all bug fixes, etc. Oracle says that it will synchonize all bug fixes from Red Hat with the Oracle flavored Linux their proposing. Additionally, Oracle’s bug fixes and other innovations will be submitted to Red Hat and the Linux community as well. Etc. With “Oracle Linux”, Oracle now essentially offers a full stack of solutions from the operating system on down for the enterprise.

• Ubuntu: not one mention in Larry’s keynote.

Other bits of news/observations:

• Oracle 11g suite of database and developer tools will be available in mid-2007, probably announced around/at 2007 JavaOne held in early May next year.

• Oracle Fusion suite of Web services/SOA products is getting a lot of interest and PR at this show. This includes this bit of news around it.

• JBoss and other Java got some mention, but the emphasis seemed to be mostly on the Oracle specific products/solutions, imo.

If you went, what did you find interesting? Please let us know.