Frank,

I'd have to agree with Doug Thompson about O'Reilly "legitimizing" Zope, because that is exactly the effect that O'Reilly books have. Sure the people who have been using Zope and its predecessors, and the Python community, are excited about it, but an O'Reilly book usually introduces a technology to a wider audience and does provide legitimacy to technically savvy managers. Where do you think Perl would be without the Camel book?

IMHO if a technology topic is useful enough that you fine folks publish a book on it, it is probably a safe bet that the technology is worthwhile.

Regards,

Christopher Hart
President
Hart Edwards Corporation, Inc.

Dear Chris:

Legitimacy may have lost whatever charm it once had.

You may remember the story in The Soul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder; Atlantic Monthly Press; 1981. ISBN# 0-316-49170-5) about Edson DeCastro, then the CEO of Data General. DG, DEC, Prime, and HP had all been selling nimble minicomputers for some time, growing by leaps and bounds, stealing sales from ponderous IBM mainframes. IBM, bowing to this pressure, finally released a minicomputer of its own. Business writers then said that IBM's entry "legitimized" the minicomputer.

When he saw this story, DeCastro had a full-page newspaper ad composed. It said only: "They Say IBM's Entry Into the Minicomputer Market Will Legitimize the Industry. The Bastards Say, Welcome."^*

DeCastro had two points: 1) the minicomputer companies were doing fine and didn't need IBM's approval; and 2) being legitimate wasn't necessarily a goal.

The story of computer technology development, in large part, is the story of the victory of the bastards over the legitimate heirs. Consider Unix vs. proprietary OSes; TCP/IP vs. OSI; the Internet vs. (the original) MSN; Linux vs. commercial Unix; Perl vs. C. Legitimacy is not the right metaphor here, because it stresses the value of origins. A better metaphor is adoption. If a technology is useful and powerful, the cognoscenti will adopt it. As it becomes widely adopted, more and more people are aware of it and consider it for their own use.

It is an understanding of this phenomenon that has led a number of technology providers, including Digital Creations, creator of Zope, to release their technology in an open-source form. They don't want their technology to be blessed by anyone, including O'Reilly; they want it to be adopted by lots of people.

O'Reilly doesn't legitimize. If we did, lots of technology creators who enjoy their status as bastards would shun us. We try to find the technologies that are interesting and powerful, that solve the problems people really have. Then we take pleasure in publishing an interesting book on that subject.

I'd like to put another issue to rest: the Camel book did not legitimize Perl. It may have accelerated Perl's adoption by making information about Perl more readily available. But the truth is that Perl would have succeeded without an O'Reilly book (as would Python and Zope), and that we're very pleased to have been smart enough to recognize Perl's potential before other publishers did. We had similar good fortune with Python, not to mention sendmail, X, MySQL and mSQL, and DocBook, to name but a few. We're pleased with our success, but don't call us legitimate, either. If readers ever stop picking up our books to find out about important technologies, we'll just be has-been overtaken by a more audacious pretender.

^*Data General did not run the ad; DeCastro had it framed and displayed in his office, however.

--Frank

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