My Trip to Europe

I'd never been to Europe before my trip to our European offices last month. I was much impressed with Europe, and our European offices in particular. Having seen the environment, I understand the differences between Europe and the USA much better than before.

Many of you read Thomas Scoville's OSS Europe: Open Source Over There article on open source software and Europe that appeared on the O'Reilly web site recently. Scoville says that Europe is more attuned to open-source style development and gives some reasons for their predilection: cost-consciousness, a fear of depending too much on US/corporate/Microsoft products, high ideals in education, even (gasp!) an underlying, nearly socialist, sense of community. I found the same phenomenon: love of Linux and other open-source development efforts is rampant.

I found several European characteristics that I would add to Scoville's list. Europeans respect their objects and don't throw them out. There is a preservationist streak in Europe that is unknown in the "use it and toss it" USA. It's different from the American conservationist emphasis on recycling. Europeans don't need to recycle; they just care for and keep on using the same things. Consequently, machines that are gathering dust in the rec rooms of US homes are still cranking out code in Europe. Linux, Apache, and other efficient open-source products run well on these underpowered but efficient machines. Office 2000 probably won't.

"Little" is a concept that is still valued and respected in Europe. In Paris, I stayed in the smallest hotel room I'd ever seen. The whole room would fit into the anteroom of most Marriotts in the US. The shower and sink were in one tiny cell; the toilet was in a tinier cell next to it. (I now understand where the term "water closet" came from.) Yet the room was comfortable and efficient. Everything I needed was nearby (very nearby). Furthermore, I was just a short distance from Notre Dame, St. Germaines Des Prés, and the O'Reilly office. My hotel room occupied little space, but it valued the space it had. (As Spencer Tracy said of Katherine Hepburn in the movie Pat and Mike: "Not much meat on her, but all of it is cherce.") Open-source technology values the space it uses, and each technology strives to do one thing well. It allows you to build a system that contains just what you want, not what the developers of the technology want you to want.

And the Europeans accept chaos and know how to live with it. I came away from France believing in the strong faith of the French people, not because of their magnificent cathedrals, but because I saw them drive around L'Arc du Triomphe. As they careened around this monument in vehicles that were little more than motorized Altoid containers, they looked like a network run by Linux servers: little packets hurtling within inches of each other, traveling together for a time, separated by other packets coming from other sources, reassembling as they sped out of the circle and onto the Champs Elysées. It's no surprise to me that much of the interest in IPv6 is coming from France -- if they don't understand delay-sensitive traffic in France, they understand it nowhere.

I was in the French office the Friday that the first copies of Open Sources: Voices of the Open Source Revolution showed up. The effect of the arrival of this book was electrifying. Before the day was out, plans were underway to translate the essays into French. By the following Wednesday, when I returned to the States, a first draft translation of one of the essays was in my email, completed by an intern in our French office, Sebastien Blondeel, over the weekend. This book represents more than just a product to them; it espouses a philosophy that they believe in. Their excitement gave me a new perspective on this book. From a company perspective, I knew that the book was important to us and to the open source movement; but I didn't foresee its power to move people, to express what they believed and wanted to see adopted by the computing community.

Similarly, the German office was abuzz with new open source software books and proposals. I've written before about the books on Qt (available now in Europe, and in April in the USA) and KDE (now being translated from German to English) coming from our German office. And, of course, our Linux Network Administrator's Guide was written by Olaf Kirsch (albeit with a US editor). I found out, though, that there are several other good projects underway in this area. Our European editors have found the kind of authors that have always produced the best O'Reilly books: committed authors, people who use and love the technology they write about. These authors want royalties, sometimes, and recognition as well; but mostly they want people to understand why the software they use and probably help develop is important and powerful; and they want to improve the world by making powerful software easy to learn and use.

Scoville's prediction that open-source technology may find its most nurturing home in Europe is very possible, in my view. We're certainly finding a lot of knowledgeable and committed authors there. We're also rediscovering that spirit that can turn a book on a prosaic technical topic into a document of importance and urgency. It's present in all the authors and technical reviewers of all the great books we've done, wherever those authors and reviewers live; but it took a trip to Europe for me to see it afresh.

Frank Willison
Editor-in-Chief

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