Hi all,

I've been on the LinuxWorld Expo in Frankfurt yesterday (which claims to be the largest in Europe) and want to share some of my experiences with you.

First of all: OOo seems to be like a ghost to the people: everyone has heard about it, noone has ever seen it. So the interest was large whereever and whenever I talked about it. I invited more than hundered people to visit the site, download the files and join us (well, I simply took the microphone... ;-)).

I could write a long mail here, but as the most is marketing stuff (and marketing is strongly needed: e.g. gnome, kde, gimp, samba and others had their own booth there and everyone knows them!) the long post can be read in the archive of the marketing list. Let me just tell you one thing: several large companies supporting Linux were there, among them IBM, Siemens and HP. SUN was missing. No Java, no StarOffice on the LWE. WHY?

Well, to the more interesting things: I was asked if OOo was interested in a small footprint multiuser RDBMS.

Xplatform? Yes. Filesize? One Floppy disk. Free? Not completly. Hmmm... could this be interesting for us?

Everyone can download it. If I understood the licence terms correctly, you can use it for free on your own purposes. But if you want to distribute it as part of a package you've got to pay. You find the files and many info at http://www.concept-asa.de (there is a link to the english pages in the center)

They support tcl, perl, php and other open standards, beside that also ODBC. But they haven't opensourced their code yet. The owner seemed to be unsure, if he should be willing to opensourse it and spread db++ as part of OOo to put interest on his product(s) - but on the other hand I think he lives from selling it, so it could be his ruin. :-(

What do you think about this? Interesting? Who should handle this?