I'd rather gargle with liquid mercury then enter this conversation,
but as a Perl hacker and card-carrying member of the O'Reilly
Stormtroopers I'd be remiss to ignore all the things being said about
the company I work for and happen to like very much. So this is going
to be a long message. Batten the hatches.
A lot has been said, so I'm going to speak first as an O'Reilly
Representative With All Notorieties Thereof (or ORWANT), then briefly
as just Orwant, and then return to ORWANT mode at the end of this message.
Last week, I was at the O'Reilly Mother Ship talking to Madeline
Schnapp. She showed me a recent article that promoted Java, and asked
if I could help write one for Perl. O'Reilly's position has always
been that Perl is an underrated technology, and that the world would
be a better place if it weren't. I told her that if she wanted good
advocacy advice, she should send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] So she
did, summarizing the meat of the Java advocacy piece (e.g. "WAP
compliance") and asked for help gathering a response. Brent, Pudge,
Rob, and Elaine followed up, talking about the points in the article,
and providing a Perl perspective. That was helpful. But it seems
like you can't walk around here without stepping on someone's hot
button, and Elaine implied that Perl didn't have an IDE.
David Grove replied pointing out that he'd written a couple of IDEs
for Perl. All well and good so far. He had an veiled dig at
ActiveState and an unveiled dig at Microsoft at the end of his
message, but I am speaking as ORWANT, and ORWANT has no opinion.
Ziggy then made some excellent points. My paraphrasing of one of them
is that nearly every Perl advocate is first and foremost a programmer.
Java has fans in every position of the corporate hierarchy, and some
people whose job is nothing more than to promote the language.
O'Reilly can, in a small way, provide some help promoting Perl.
Then there were more comments from Simon, Elaine, Steven, Chris,
Madeline, Tushar, Vicki, and Ziggy, with a wee bit of tension that
I'll summarize as people disagreeing where to make the tradeoff
between defense and offense in our advocacy.
Then John Porter brought up perl.com in response to Elaine's mention
of a portal for Perl. As Johan pointed out later, O'Reilly does not
own perl.com. Tom Christiansen does, and a chunk of O'Reilly called
the O'Reilly Network licensed it from Tom and pays for its maintenance
(and a small stipend for Mark-Jason Dominus as editor).
Rodney pointed out that Perl isn't mentioned on oreillynet.com.
I think that's because www.perl.com isn't what they consider
a "devcenter", but instead is something more. Regardless, I agree
that it looks bad and will try to get that changed.
Then David Grove talked about his problems with the ad/article he
placed in TPJ. I replied to that, and he replied to me in private.
Since David is no longer on this list, I'll leave it at that.
Simon, in response to my response, said:
> * O'Reilly clamps down very strongly on criticism of itself.
> David Grove has just been unsubscribed. I won't miss him one bit,
> but it's interesting that it was for criticism of O'Reilly. No,
> don't jump on this. This is just an example. O'Reilly *does* clamp
> down very strongly on criticism of itself. (Let's see the drones fly
> in now...)
As I recall, Gnat listed some other reasons he was unsubscribing
David. Simon, whether you agree with them or not, Gnat was acting on
his own. He doesn't work for O'Reilly, and O'Reilly didn't (and
shouldn't, and wouldn't) ask him to kick anyone off any list. But you
asked me not to jump on this, so I won't: let's call it a single datum
and leave it at that.
You bring up a broader claim that O'Reilly clamps down on criticism.
This surprises me, because I honestly can't figure out what events
you're thinking of. If you can elaborate, I'll be happy to respond.
> * O'Reilly places *ridiculously* unfair constraints on the use
> of traditional Perl mascots. It's impossible to use a camel in
> conjunction with Perl now. I know - our Perl Mongers have tried.
> This *seriously* upsets me.
This is where ORWANT turns into Orwant and I stop speaking for the
company, because I think you have an excellent point. To keep a
trademark, you have to be vigilant in protecting it. If you don't,
you lose the legal protection that a trademark provides. (I hope we'd
all agree that it'd be unfair for another publisher to put a camel on
its cover, because it would make references to "the Camel book"
ambiguous.) O'Reilly goes further when asserting its trademark
rights, and in my opinion (again, not speaking for the company) the
constraints are too strict. I don't know the exact details of the
Mongers arrangement (the agreement was made before I joined the
company), but I know enough to not like them. On Monday I'll see
what I can do to loosen them. No guarantees, though.
Later, Simon wrote:
> > * O'Reilly clamps down very strongly on criticism of itself.
>
> As expected, I have been asked to retract my remarks; please pretend
> that anything South of this line does not exist. No personal offense was
> meant to Nat, the list manager. I did say "don't jump on this", but that
> was apparently not enough. I shall make it clearer by asking you to
> mentally erase the paragraph below. The line above, however, stands.
I don't know who asked you to retract your remarks. I'm guessing it
was Gnat, who is probably trying to reduce the temperature of this
conversation and return topics to Perl advocacy. But speaking as
ORWANT again, I'd like to encourage you to say what's on your mind.
Then Brent says:
> This is really sad. No matter how good a company may be, there will be
> those who criticize. So what? People are allowed to have opinions and
> should be allowed to voice them - though blatant slander is wrong no
> matter what. But I don't think that was the issue here.
>
> It is sad to see that those of us who are trying to promote Perl are
> being censored by a company that I thought we looked up to...
Whoa. Gnat (who, again, does not work for O'Reilly) kicked David off
the list, and (I'm guessing) sent private mail to Simon. O'Reilly
hasn't censored anyone. And I'm now speaking for the company when I
encourage Simon to air his grievances. I don't know enough about his
claim that O'Reilly clamps down on criticism to respond.
We welcome criticism; it will help make us a better company. And for
the record, we welcome the existence of books, web sites, and
conferences that promote open source technologies. I heartily
recommend Damian Conway's book Object Oriented Perl (Manning Press),
and use.perl.org, and YAPC, where I'll be next week if any of you want
to discuss these matters in person.
-Jon
----------------------------------------------------
Jon Orwant [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CTO, O'Reilly & Associates http://www.oreilly.com
