O'Reilly Network: In Defense of Non-Technical Discussion

Published on O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/)
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Date: May, 2000
From: Thompson, Anthony R.
Subject: In Defense of Non-Technical Discussion

In an earlier Ask Tim, Bill Burris wrote the following to you:

"In the past you have written about how Microsoft used unfair practices to enable IIS to gain an advantage over Apache. The Open Source community would be better served if you spent your time on technical comparison of products."

I'd like to respectfully say that I completely disagree with Bill in this regard (though I do share his interest in seeing how useful and scalable PHP is for large projects). I found your descriptions of what occurred with Microsoft and the IIS/WebSite issue, as well as other comments on the competitive tactics used, extremely interesting. Beyond my personal interest, however, I think that the Open Source community is very well served when it has actual descriptions of how things work in the business world. There are armies of budding Open Source programmers who can make technical comparisons of products, but business acumen is a critical component for making many of the new Open Source based initiatives succeed in the real world.

Business skills are, quite frankly, something that the technical community has often been perceived as lacking, and anything we can do to increase those skills will only help our Open Source products succeed in the market against tenacious competitors like Microsoft. I am not saying that Open Source products should be oriented toward competing with commercial products. I believe one of the great strengths of Open Source is the fact that volunteer programmers can make good design decisions like 100% standards compliance which a corporation wouldn't necessary allow them to do. I am, however, saying that if we want to make Open Source more than an interesting historical footnote then we need more people in our community to have the business savvy necessary to recognize real world market forces and take them into account when charting courses for projects.

I don't read ask_tim for technical comparisons--I can get that kind of thing anywhere. I do read it for the unique bird's eye perspective that you can provide on our industry, community, and movement. In this instance, it's the rare perspective of a leader in a company which went head-to-head with Microsoft. Another excellent example is your full treatment of the relevance of patenting (a non-technical issue) to the future of the Web and Open Source technology (Bruce Perens' article on linuxworld.com is also a great analysis of this). Sharing these kinds of experiences, and what we can learn from them collectively, is vital if we hope to make Open Source into a viable and attractive option for organizations in the future. So please, don't limit your discussions to the technical comparison of products.

Anthony

Anthony,

Thanks for the compliments! One of the things a lot of people don't realize is just how much technology is changing the world today. In addition to obvious social issues like Internet privacy (covered in the new book Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel), or the danger of software patents, something as simple as the spread of a given technology can have profound social ramifications.

We look back at our history, and realize what a role we've played, as midwife to several revolutions!

Our publication of Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog in 1992 ushered in the Internet revolution. It introduced many people to the Internet for the first time (including every member of Congress, to each of whom we had sent a copy. This inspired piece of guerilla marketing was suggested by Brian Erwin, our then VP of Marketing, who had previously been director of activism for the Sierra Club.) Perhaps more importantly, we read in a Spy magazine interview that appeared a few years back that the NCSA team that went on to create the Mosaic Web browser first learned of the Web from an O'Reilly brochure promoting Ed's book and the Web site we'd created to accompany it. That Web site, GNN (Global Network Navigator), was the first Web portal, and the first site on the Web to carry third-party advertising.
Our publication of books like Programming Perl, DNS and Bind, Sendmail, and other classic titles on Open Source and internet-related software gave legitimacy to what had previously been an underground movement, and helped give early ISPs and Web sites the tools they needed to develop the rich, innovative culture, uncontrolled by major vendors, that has proven so productive in years since.
In early 1998, we brought together the leaders of various free software projects in a "summit meeting" to help discover what they had in common, and to let the world know that the Internet had been built on software that was completely off the radar of "the suits." It was at that summit that the gathered leaders formally adopted the term "Open Source." The press conference after the event led to national publicity, including the famous issue of Forbes with Linus Torvalds on the cover, and full page photos of Brian Behlendorf, Larry Wall, and Richard Stallman in the interior spread.

Somewhere along the way, we realized that our customers are changing the world, and that part of our job at O'Reilly is to help them think through the implications of the technologies they are unleashing. No one can deny that the Internet has changed everything! And it's only one of many technologies that will do so.

Some technologies are grassroots in their spread, and in the innovations they cause. In cases like this, an information provider can have enormous impact. Where vendors spend millions marketing products, powerful ideas are passed from one user to another. When the word is spreading like that, we can provide the details to follow up the dream.

In this sense, the bulk of our business--providing hard core technical details via our books, Web sites, conferences, and market research--is itself a profoundly social act. To fail to comment on the outcome of that work, to fail to explore the forces of the market or of society that affect whether a technology succeeds or fails, or the extent to which it achieves its potential, would be to miss an enormous opportunity.

In this regard, you might be interested in two pieces I've recently written. One is a review of Lawrence Lessig's awesome book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and the other is a summary of a talk I gave at the Waterside Publishing Conference entitled Beyond the Book.

Tim