Oracle says it’s playing by open source community rules

SINGAPORE -- Reiterating its support to the open source community, Oracle Corp. said it has always been playing by the community's rules, not imposing its own standards, an executive told reporters here.

While declining to comment directly on the recent approval of a Microsoft-backed data format by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the company said it would continue supporting the open standards community.

"We have been supporting the ISO. Our involvement in ISO is not about one against the other," said Shane Owenby, senior director of the Linux and Open Source in Oracle Corp. in Asia Pacific.

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Open source big names helping attract new users

Participation by big open source vendors is helping attract new interest in Linux user groups in Asia.

Khairil Yusof, president of the Free/Open Source Software Society (FOSS) in Malaysia, said in an interview that the group's members have benefited by sharing knowledge with others from different technology backgrounds during its monthly meetings.

New members are able to listen to talks ranging from a wide spectrum of topics such as desktop usage to running an open source software business, as well as "personally meet local and international developers", said Yusof.

"This exposes them to one of the biggest advantages of [the group], that interactions and knowledge-sharing has no barriers...a junior developer can ask questions and have an informal conversation with international personalities such as IBM's [vice president of open source and standards] Bob Sutor or Sun's [chief open source officer] Simon Phipps," Yusof said.

Denis Antipov, one of the first members of The Dining Philosophers, one of two Shanghai Linux user groups, said his group has also benefited from inviting representatives of open source companies to give talks, which he said has incited new interest in the group.

For the Malaysian group, organizing monthly meetings has also helped expand the group's contact with other developer interest groups, noted Yusof.

He said the monthly meetings have "continued to attract increasing numbers, creating a better local community compared to communicating via mailing lists in the past".

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Guerrilla IT? Sounds like open source

Dan Tynan wrote a great story in InfoWorld recently about Guerrilla IT and how to leverage it by empowering your super users and implementing ways for folks to collaborate and share best practices. I couldn't help but think how so many good innovations have snuck into IT through the back door, the side door and under the radar of what management officially approved.

Consider in the early days that lots of CIOs didn't want to have to deal with PCs or Macintoshes. So departments just approved the expense themselves and that's how killer apps like Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Aldus Pagemaker made inroads into organizations. Sooner or later, IT organizations realized they'd be better off supporting the rogue applications and PCs, rather than fighting them.

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