Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1998 07:54:07 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> To: FreeBSD-questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Tim O'Reilly talking about Windows Books Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980410073840.355A-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu>
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Posted due to popular demand. This was gleaned from usenet. There is no need to CC: me in any discussion about Mr. O'Reilly's comments. This is simply for your edification. Have fun, | Stop warning me about the latest virus. Learn more... Jason Wells | http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html >From tim@ora.com Sun Apr 5 20:46:04 1998 Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 04:23:28 -0800 From: Tim O'Reilly <tim@ora.com> Cc: tim@ora.com Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy, comp.unix.advocacy Subject: Re: ORA - so much for loyalty... Bill Vermillion wrote: > > In article <6aj20v$9ht$3@shadow.skypoint.net>, > Jamie Hoglund <jhoglund@mirage.skypoint.net> wrote: > >In comp.os.linux.advocacy Bob Nelson <bnelson@netcom.com> wrote: > >: You'd think that as often as he's been screwed over by the gang from > >: Redmond that Tim would realize that he ought to ``dance with the > >: gal whut brung him''. ORA has a large and loyal following in the Unix > >: community -- but his embracing of all things from Micro$quish puts > >: that in serious jeopardy. Someone brought this thread to my attention, and I thought I'd respond directly. 1) We have most definitely NOT abandoned UNIX and open systems. We do the definitive books on virtually every area of freeware and open systems. That includes most of the programs that make this whole shebang work--DNS/Bind, Sendmail, Perl, Linux, Apache--as well as all the non-Internet related UNIX software we've always done books for. We have EXPANDED our line. We are now trying to bring enlightenment to the heathen, so to speak. We are definitely not sucking up to Microsoft. If we were, why would we have hired perennial Microsoft thorn-in-the-side Andrew Shulman to be our chief windows book editor? Our goal is to get under the hood, to get people to question authority, and to fix what's broken, just like they do in the UNIX world. We have this whole series called "Annoyances" (Windows 95 Annoyances, Word Annoyances etc.) that helps people to do all the things MS doesn't like them to do. Or take our NT publishing program. All of our NT admin books show people how to subvert the GUI, how to automate things with Perl. We're bringing the freeware spirit to MS, not caving in to MS. As someone once said, "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Good information helps people to do good work. So please try to get off the binary "if they are doing stuff on Microsoft they've abandoned us." We're also doing books on other platforms--the BeOS, the PalmPilot, even the Mac (e.g. the popular freeware tool, Frontier). Obviously, you can consider the web as a platform as well. We also have a whole series of books on Java, and on Oracle. We see our books on Windows as entirely consistent with our whole history of publishing: we try to give good, honest information that empowers users. As we grow as a company, we're doing that for more and more platforms. 2) Someone else mentioned that Windows books were in the front of the catalog, with UNIX and Linux moved to the back. As a matter of fact, as we've reinvigorated our direct mail efforts, we have a whole bunch of different direct mail catalogs, which rotate different books to the front depending on which list we're testing. We are definitely doing a big campaign to persuade windows users of the value of O'Reilly. But we are doing just as much or more for other communities. For example, both our Perl and Java programs are way higher priority for us, with more books, more marketing dollars, and more focus than Windows. Heck, we've even organized a Perl conference (going on to the second this year...see us in San Jose in August!) to help promote the language. At the same time, we'd be silly to ignore the boys from Redmond. I've been talking to press a lot lately on the heels of the Netscape source code announcement, because I'm one of the most visible spokespeople for the importance of free software. One of the things I heard myself saying is that the free software communities are the hidden "third leg" of the software industry tripod. Microsoft is one leg. Everyone else commercial is the other. And freeware is the third. So I guess I have to turn that around for you guys. We started out with the freeware leg. But if we want to become the dominant computer book publisher (a job we're well on the way towards), we need to serve the entire market, not just one part of it. But mainly what I want to get across is that information has no "color" (to steal an analogy from race relations). People who use Microsoft platforms are just as much in need (actually in more need) of the high quality, objective technical information that is the core of our business. As I said above, think of our Microsoft publishing as "missionary work." :-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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