Candidate Statement

Sun Nov 9 13:55:31 PST 2003

My name is Alan DuBoff and I've been attending BayLISA since the '94/'95 
timeframe. I've been involved in many user groups in the past, going back to 
the early 80's where I was one of the early founders of the Tokyo PC User 
Group in Japan, aprox. '82/'83 timeframe. Ironically, this group is still 
active to this day, and although all of the original founders have since 
moved back to their homelands, the tradition continues on.

After returning to the U.S. in '87, I was involved in several user groups, 
the first called LAMLUG (L.A. ms Languages User Group) with microsoft which I 
founded and was president for aprox 1.5 years, when they were promoting OS/2. 
This group was merged into another user group sponsored by IBM when IBM and 
ms had their historical divorce over OS/2 and Windows. I continued on as 
president. Following that, the L.A. OS/2 User Group was formed which I was 
president for 2 or 3 years at which point the Northridge earthquake rendered 
the IBM Santa Monica building condemmed. It was shortly after that when I 
moved to Silicon Valley to work on the PowerPC port of Oracle to IBM's 
Workplace OS which was shortly canceled (Oracle did get their engine ported 
and running on the mach kernel at the time though!;-).

During 2002 I was one of 6 community representative (dubbed the "Secret Six") 
who negotiated to get Solaris x86 back when Sun announced on Jan. 8th, 2002 
that they would indefinitely delay Solaris 9 x86. Sun Microsystems hired me 
on May 19th, 2003 to work on Solaris x86 with the community, the same day 
which Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison stood on stage to announce their new 
"Low Cost Computing" strategy. Recentely we've announced that Sun will be 
porting a 64 bit version to the AMD Opteron chip to throw a monkey wrench in 
the commodity hardware solutions arena. Prior to joining Sun I have been a 
consultant for the best part of the past 20 years, with the exception of 
working on the Kerbango Internet Radio which used Embedded Linux. I consulted 
for aprox. 1.5 years at VA Linux Systems (Linux work of course;-), close to a 
year on WebVan (Solaris SPARC on the backend), 5 months for Cisco, 2.5 years 
at Taligent/IBM, as well as other fortune 500 type companies in Silicon 
Valley, Japan, and Los Angeles, where I was born.

While I have been involved with UNIX/Linux on various platforms, I have 
primarily been involved with versions running on x86 hardware for my personal 
use, in many cases integrating that work onto larger platforms for 
deployment. So it's safe to say that I have used mostly FreeBSD, Linux, and 
Solaris x86 on my personal hardware, although I do own a small amount of 
SPARC hardware. I do not use or advocate the use of any ms products 
whatsoever, and I kick and scream in the cases where I'm forced to use any of 
them. Fortunately with the upswing of UNIX/Linux, it has allowed me to 
continue this personal choice.

I'm a bit unclear on a statement of whether I would serve, even if not 
elected. I will certainly give reccomendations to the board if not elected, 
but BayLISA won't hurt my feelings should they not elect me. I don't think I 
would put near the effort in BayLISA should I not be elected, but I certainly 
will continue to support and be a member of BayLISA should they not, just as 
I do today.

-- 

Alan DuBoff
Software Orchestration, Inc.
GPG: 1024D/B7A9EBEE 5E00 57CD 5336 5E0B 288B 4126 0D49 0D99 B7A9 EBEE