Jon Orwant (lists.advocacy):
>I'd rather gargle with liquid mercury then enter this conversation,
Thank you for doing so - voices of sanity always welcome!
>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.
This is something I am no way going to deny. Programmers spread the word
to programmers and corporations spread the word to corporations.
O'Reilly has not just a small, but a very large part to play in that. It
*is* hard to work for companies which are, in essence, profit-seeking
(not that there's anything wrong with that) to work in perfect harmony
with a hacker community. RedHat and friends *generally* get it right,
TrollTech, Corel and friends *generally* get it wrong. I may not agree
with everything O'Reilly does or the way they do it, but I'll admit that
they're *generally* in the first category.
>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).
Isn't it more than that? It seems payment for commissioned articles
comes from O'Reilly. Or is this some bizarre Songline interaction? I'm
not sure how that all works.
>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.
This is off topic for advocacy; I'll reply to this privately.
> 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.
You're a gentleman.
--
Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are.
-- Pope St. Gregory I
