Been a whirlwind day so far, meeting with vendors, seeing demos, attending a few minutes of the Business of Open Source Databases panel featuring Martin Mickos (MySQL), Mike Olson (Sleepycat), Jon Prial (IBM), Christof Wittig (db4objects) and others. Incidentally, thanks to Mike for floating my Crazy as a Firefox idea – and he wasn’t shouted off stage.
All in all, attendance seems good to me, though I’m told it’s down slightly. The pulse of the show is good, however, and I’ve walked through dozens of interesting conversations today on my way to discussions of my own. Where else can you eavesdrop on a heated debate over the merits of Debian versus Gentoo (both sides made good points)?
What’s the coolest thing I’ve seen thus far? Easy: Hula. Many of you may recall that I’ve been bullish on Google’s Gmail (1, 2, 3), and have concluded that with the addition of basic calendaring and a few other features, it’d be a credible enterprise alternative. Here’s Udell’s take.
Well, to me the only thing that would be better than Gmail would be an open source Gmail; one that’s scriptable and includes calendar functionality along with some customizability. That, in a nutshell, is Hula’s mission in life. I’ll be playing with this internally, and I’m hopeful that Novell will find a host willing to run this as a managed service, as that’s the bare minimum for us to consider moving to it. See the notes from the Novell folks here (Joe, Miguel, and Nat).
Will have more impressions from the show as I get time.
