Chris Devers wrote: > > Ok, so I never look at F*ckedcompany & maybe that's a good thing, but I'm > looking right now and they're running two rumors of interest: > > * O'Reilly are laying off 16 people > Are they in trouble? In danger? What would the repurcussions of this > be? They seem to be pretty big advocates (biggest?) of a lot of the > open source stuff, particularly Perl. These projects may not end if > O'Reilly suffers or disappears, but they might be impeded badly, no?
I worked at O'Reilly for a year and half until this October. I still have many good friends at the company and have some insight into this issue. Is O'Reilly in trouble? Like other technical publishers, they have been hit hard by the poor economic climate. The slow conference season, business deals that didn't blossom as well as expected and the death of their editor-in-chief all contributed to what can only be called a shitty year. Should O'Reilly fail to recover, the Open Source movement would lose one of its earliest and loudest supporters. This isn't to say the OSS would disappear, but it might be harder for some technologies (like Python or XML-RPC) to break through to a wider audience. Perl will be fine. Remember, O'Reilly isn't a software house; they're a publisher of great books. Still, I hope 2002 brings decidedly better news to ORA. If you would like to help O'Reilly, do consider buying a book from their web site (http://www.ora.com). -- ---------------- Joe Johnston - http://taskboy.com "A closed mouth gathers no feet."
