Jim Grisanzio (left) and Avi Miller (right) at Oracle Open World in Singapore, March 2019.

If you’ve never heard Oracle’s Avi Miller riff on Linux and open source, you’re going to really enjoy this podcast. Avi is senior manager of Oracle Linux and VM Product Management, and he’s passionate and energetic about open source. I’ve interviewed him on two previous occasions (Singapore, San Francisco), and I think I’m going to make this exercise a habit. It’s fun. And I learn a lot about Oracle’s growing number of open source projects, how many Oracle engineers are actively engaged in upstream projects, and interesting new ways people are contributing to projects.

Listen to the podcast on Podbean.

In our September 8 conversation, Avi touched on a variety of projects including Oracle Linux, GraalVM, Java, VirtualBox, Oracle Cloud, file systems, and kernel scheduling. Regarding Oracle’s contributions to the Linux community, Avi points out that Oracle’s involvement goes way back to its original work to get Oracle Database on Linux, which later led to Oracle’s Linux distribution. Oracle’s support of open source development continues right up to the present day. Oracle now has two Linux teams: one involved in mainline Linux development, and the other in productizing and sustaining Oracle’s Linux distribution.

There are many open source projects emerging at Oracle, and many ways for developers and community members to get involved. Avi would know; he contributes to the team that manages Oracle’s GitHub program, which now has more than 1,500 engineers working on 300 source repositories.