Linux World Expo

San Jose Convention Center

I got there a little late, just in time to see the tail end of the Corel keynote. There was a demo of Quattro Pro running in the WINE environment. WINE (Which stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator") is a program which allows you to run Windows applications under Linux. Corel has been contributing substantial resources to the WINE project, on the theory that this will be the easiest way to get their applications ported. I have to say that the result looked pretty good, or at least it wasn’t obviously slow.

One piece of big news is that Corel is going to be doing their own Linux distribution, called "Corel Desktop Linux". This will be a Linux targeted specifically at desktop users, with an easy installation, a full suite of Corel office applications, and integration with Microsoft networking.

Right after that came a keynote speech from one of the Senior VP’s of Oracle computing. The first part of the talk was the typical Oracle agitprop about centralizing everything onto a large server, away from the "client server" architecture "popularized by Microsoft". Methinks we’re skipping over a little bit of history here. However, once we got past all that, it got real interesting.

Oracle 8i is their new "database for the Internet". It contains a complete Java virtual machine—you do all of your database procedures in Java, and you can in fact write your entire application in Java inside the database itself. The server knows how to talk HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and all of the other popular protocols, so it can act as a web server, FTP server, and can even send email messages. It understands all of the popular file formats, so that you can stuff all of your web pages, images, real-audio streams, MPEG movies, and other media content into the database and have it serve these up to end users. You can tweak the security as you like, and of course since it’s an Oracle database it can back itself up while it’s running, which according to the Oracle flack, the MS databases can’t do (he claims that Barnes and Noble, which is running an MS database, has never backed up their site.)

One really impressive feature was the fact that the database could be mounted as a network filesystem. So putting all of that "internet content" into the database is incredibly simple, you just drag the data to the "O:" drive. Also, the database knows how to convert between types, so that if you want to view a document as a Word file, you see it as a Word file, and if you’re using a Browser, you see it as an HTML document. Pretty powerful stuff, I was impressed. Had it been available today, I would have recommended strongly to my employers that they consider moving to this platform.

According to the speaker, this will be available for Linux in about a month, and developers can get a development version of the server for free. He stated that they have over 100 developers working on Linux, and that Oracle recently did a survey and counted over 1400 Linux servers at their company.

Unfortunately, the people at the Oracle booth weren’t quite up to speed on all of the technical details of their own product. I had a bunch of questions prepared: "How about version control for Java development? There’s eight people working on our application, how do we keep them from stepping all over each other? Does your server support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)? Can we get a Verisign global ID for your server?" Unfortunately, no one at the booth was able to answer any of my questions.

There were a number of "major" companies there. Some of the booths were selling the same old legacy unix applications they always had. Sun and SCO were both showing how they could run unmodified Linux binaries— there was a demo of Quake running on a Solaris box, for example. (Personally, I don’t see how companies like SCO can thrive in the new environment unless they radically change their business model. Otherwise...can you say "deer caught in the headlights?" At least Sun is diversified.)

The Compaq booth also had a bunch of high-end hardware running Linux, in this case it was mostly Alpha boxes. I’m not surprised that Compaq is pushing the Alpha stuff at a Linux show, since it’s about the only major OS that runs on Alphas anymore.

There were of course a number of booths for the various distributions:

Red Hat, Caldera, Turbo Linux, Debian, Slackware, and S.u.S.E.

I spent a little bit of time talking with the people responsible for Slashdot. We discussed the problems with anonymous postings, and what could be done about it. Rob, the creator of Slashdot, doesn’t want to anger the existing user base by "taking away" privileges that they already have, so he’s limited in what he can do with the existing system. However, we talked about the possibility of a parallel site, one that would be focused more on community issues, where the technology would allow some kinds of community standards to be enforced, those standards being determined by the community itself, of course.

At 6:30 the third keynote of the day was given by Linus Torvalds. The hall was packed—and this was a very large hall. One thing that has always impressed about Linus is his humility and lack of ego. As he said in the talk "The internet has more than it’s share of visionaries. I’m not a visionary—to me, a guy standing in the middle of the road looks like roadkill. I’m just an engineer who knows what he wants, but even more I know how I want to get there." I don’t think that the Linux community could have picked a better person to elevate to the status of sainthood; had it been me, I would have found the temptation to exploit my status and my popularity irresistible. "I didn’t write Linux for any lofty philosophical ideals, I wrote it because I enjoyed doing it." At the same time, he said that "it’s good to have some morals" when creating a new technology such as an operating system.

Linus also mentioned that he’s happy that a lot of people are still using the 2.0 version of Linux, which at this point is over two and a half years old. He doesn’t believe that people should be forced to be on a continuous upgrade treadmill. The fact they they have an old OS, but can still run all of the applications they need is something that he considers a success.

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