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Interviste

Interview to Andy Oram from O'Reilly

• Q: First of all, thank you for this interview. Would you like to describe in few words to our reader what O'Reilly & Associates is?
  
  
• A: We're mostly a book publisher, although we've started to move into Web software and online books. We're kind of funky; people are always telling us we're cool. And I think it's because we're in the middle of things with our users. Also, we don't take the pronouncements of the computer vendors too seriously; we'd rather find out what real users have to do to survive and help spread around the information.

  In the 1980's we became well-known in the UNIX community as the best source of information for UNIX and X. We've branched out since then. For instance, we published one of the first books about the Internet (``The Whole Internet'') and got on the Web around the same time Mosaic first came out; we've always been in the center there. As for Linux, we were informed fairly early of that phenomenon (and it truly is a social phenomenon, as much as a technical one) and now have a Linux series of four or five books as well as Linux-enhanced versions of many UNIX books.
  
  

• Q: O'Reilly was one of the first publishers to be interested in Linux. Do you remember why?
  
  
• A: The book development process at O'Reilly & Associates has a lot in common with tool development in the free software community. We tend to show the same characteristics as users collaborating to create software: curiosity, consensus, bold experiments to test the waters, clever juggling to keep our options open -- and usually a mixed feeling of surprise and sureness when we reach a decision about what to do.

  Even though the process is new and different for every case, the Linux project could almost serve as a case study. So it's natural that we and the Linux community got together.
  
  

• Q: When did this meeting take place?
  
  
• A: In September 1992, O'Reilly & Associates began hearing tales of Linux through odd channels. A programmer named Bill Hahn had started playing with Linux and talking to developers. He wrote repeatedly about its potential and the growing user community to a writer he knew, Lar Kaufman. Lar was in contact with O'Reilly as part of a project on doc tools and standards for Unix man pages. Furthermore, Lar was currently working with me, a writer who was editing some books for O'Reilly part-time. Together, the three of us -- none of us an O'Reilly employee, each of us hooked in to the greater computer community in different ways -- fed postings from comp.os.linux into O'Reilly, and started up a debate about the potential for writing a book.
  
  
• Q: It sounds as everything was rosy. But, what about the decision-makers at O'Reilly?
  
  
• A: The editors tempered their support for free software with some caution at jumping into a project that was so ill-coordinated and unstable as Linux. They too had contacts and research channels; their expert polls and speculative statistics took turns with ours, passing back and forth over an e-mail channel.
  
  
• Q: This doesn't surprise me. What is surprising is the fact that, after all, O'Reilly started to publish Linux related books. Please, continue the story.
  
  
• A: Bill, who hankered to be an author and had floated a few ideas for books in front of O'Reilly already, submitted a rough proposal to write a book about Linux, spun around the popular reference material from our ``Unix in a Nutshell.'' It took no less than 7 months of research and debate to come up with a contract - and then, unfortunately, he got too busy to write. But ``Linux in a Nutshell'' finally made it onto the market at the beginning of 1997 - long after we publlished some other successful Linux books.

  Meanwhile, during negotiations, Lar and I came to work at O'Reilly full-time. Another O'Reilly employee started running Linux on a system at home. We got in contact with Linus Torvalds, the Linux Documentation Project, the Linux journal, the companies creating the SLS and Yggdrasil distributions, someone trying to set up a trust fund, the writer of a German reference book on Linux, and many other interesting people.

  We started talking with the Linux Documentation Project about publishing books written by volunteers. Meanwhile, we continued to integrate Linux into our regular offerings -- for instance, by making sure that Unix Power Tools build on Linux, and by collecting material for an eventual ``Linux in a Nutshell.''

End of part one

di Stefano Campadello

Intervista (IT) Copertina Firewall