LinuxWorld 2005 - Keynotes

In the spirit of "Better later than never", I would blog my San Francisco LinuxWorld trip. It's my first-eve LinuxWorld trip.

Day 1:

I attended the keynote by Charles Phillips from Oracle.
Oracle chose Linux as its part of certified stack because Linux is open, and Oracle does not have its own OS. If Orcale apps have problems with Microsoft OS, it will have to get the support from MS. But with Linux, everything is open. Oracle can troubleshoot problems themselves and determine whehter it's a OS problem and application problem. If Oracle finds any bug, it'll fix it and contribute fixes back to Linux.

Oracle also uses Linux for grid computing. Instead of scaling-up with a couple of servers, a data center can just add more Linux to a grid to scale out. The hardware Linux runs on is cheap. Linux server is commoditized. Just buy more to scale out if you need more! There's no need to buy one expensive server and keep adding memories, disks, cpus. This is where Linux is eating Unix's market shares.

In the keynote "The Explosive Growth of Linux and Open Source: What does it all mean", Chris DiBona from Google talked about why Google power servers using Linux instead of any other OS. It got the same reasons why Oracle chose Linux. Google can troubleshoot and fix any problem in the OS level instead of getting support from a company like MS if they use Windows. Plus, Google hacks the Linux kernel for optimization, which is impossible with any other proprietary software.

I also went to The Golden Penguin Bowl and had a good laugh.
Jeremy Allison told the funniest joke(maybe it's true): he went to China and askes why Linux distribution is not pirated in China. Well, not because it's free. It's because a Linux distribution genearlly takes up more cd disks than MS.

Day 2:
I missed Software Protection and the Impact on Innovation. This was the most interesting keynote in day 2.
Many patents shouldn't have been issued at the first place.
for example:

Epicrealm Uses Vague Patents to sue Web Sites - "If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO."

A company(especailly a big one) can just launch patent attacks on its competitor.

Tags: linux linuxworld patent