Today a scheduling miracle happened—for once I was in the same town as the event I was invited to—and I got to hear Omar Tazi speak to a local Oracle users group about open source. Omar gave an excellent presentation, and clarified several points that often confuse folks when they try to relate Oracle and open source.

Unbreakable Linux Is NOT A Distribution

I hear this all the time. People think that Oracle has created their own distribution of Linux. Not true. Oracle Unbreakable Linux is simply a support program that provides enterprises with world-class, global support for Linux. In most cases, Oracle customers are looking for a single scapegoat, and blaming Oracle for Linux fits their “one throat to choke” requirements.

Their Developers Depend On Linux

Linux is Oracle’s base development platform. In fact, more than 9,000 Oracle developers use Linux. Pretty impressive when you consider all they’re developing. It also speaks volumes about Linux’s stability in an enterprise class development environment. I work at the one of the largest software companies in the world. We have 15,000 customers in hundreds of countries. Oracle has more developers using Linux than we have employees.

Linux Powers Their Business

Most of Oracle’s key servers run Linux—according to today’s presentation, tens of thousands. What do these servers do, you ask? According to Omar, pretty much everything. Linux powers everything from Oracle.com and demo systems to the company’s financial backend and development organization. Even Oracle On Demand, with an impressive 10,000 servers and 3.5 Petabytes of storage hosting services for over 450 enterprise customers, runs on penguins.

Their Customers Love PHP

Oracle supports PHP in a big way. Why? Their customers want them to. Thousands of developers use Oracle and PHP, and this number is exploding thanks to Oracle XE. Many of the company’s key products support PHP including Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle JDeveloper 10g PHP Extensions. Oracle also worked with leading PHP provider Zend to create “Zend Core for Oracle,” a set of free, pre-built, pre-tested PHP-Oracle interface modules.

They’re Experiencing A Total Eclipse

Oracle has a well-defined Eclipse strategy. They want to accelerate the adoption of the key technologies like EJB3/JPA, JavaServer Faces, and BPEL. Their customers already use Eclipse for Java/Java EE development and enjoy similar productivity to those using JDeveloper. Oracle’s vision is based on what Omar called “Productivity with Choice.” This means making application development for the Oracle platform as easy as possible—regardless of IDE. Oracle has also donated its Java persistence framework and Oracle TopLink to the open source community. All that, and Oracle recently became a board member of the Eclipse Foundation and assumed “Strategic Developer” status.

They Created Dali

Part of Oracle’s Eclipse strategy is the Dali tools project, which supports a number of different JPA development and deployment scenarios including EJB, Web, and plain old Java. We’re basically talking about JPA support for Eclipse, including the definition, editing, and deployment of Object-Relational (O/R) mappings for JPA Entities (JSR 220). This simplifies mapping definition and editing via intelligent mapping assistance and dynamic problem identification. Currently Dali is incubating under the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP).

Apache, Trinidad, and MyFaces

Oracle has been working with the Apache Software Foundation for quite some time. In fact, they incubated a project called “Trinidad” over a year ago, which involved donating code to the ASF under a top-level project called Apache MyFaces. This donation included over 100 UI components, an HTML AJAX RenderKit, Dialog Framework, Menu Model Abstraction, Maven 2 Faces Plugin, Personalization Framework, and the RenderKit Skinning Architecture. Measured on any scale, that’s quite a donation. What impresses me most is they did it under the Apache 2.0 License and guidelines of the ASF. Not the kind of behavior that most would expect from Oracle.

So there you have it, a little window into Oracle’s operations in the open source software community. Omar gave a convincing presentation, but also made it clear that open source is a tactical consideration for the company. The way I see it, Oracle gets open source better than most large companies. It’s not a strategy-of-the-month, it’s something Omar and company eat, breath, and sleep with every day, and it’s at the heart of their business. Most importantly, everything Omar does is solidly based on what’s best for Oracle’s customers.

• digg it