[Catalyst] O'Reilly Radar

[Stéphane Payrard]

Christopher H. Laco a écrit :
| Sebastian Riedel wrote:
| 
| Whah? I think O'Reilly has, or is slipping off the deep end over the
| last year. I'm not sure if it's a too-big-for-our-britches syndrome, or
| just a loss of touch with the community; the flip flop from publishing
| quality books towards publishing what buzzwords the sheep hear and
| look for.

Non-sense.

Tim has a good history of putting his company money where his words
are so I find this bashing totally absurd. He has always been an
enlighted and successful advocate of Open Source (whatever the names
have been) in the business world. Yes I find the "Web 2.0" name silly
but apparently it works in the real world that is not interested in
specifics. So be it.

Tim O'Reilly did a lot for Perl and certainly will in the future. In
the Cringely NerdTv podcast (*) , Tim talks a lot about Perl and even
cite Larry.  "Information want to be valuable". And one of Tim mottos
is "bringing more value than we take".  The O'Reilly company history
is tied to Perl, he knows it and says it.  He knows that getting big
can mean being distanced form the base and want his company to be more
"porous" prcisely to avoid "loss of touch with the communauty" (your
words).

Publishing a book too early can be a diservice to everyone.  The two
editions of Perl6 book come to mind.  They probably did not sell
much. And they are so outdated that they are not of much use for the
people that want to come to speed with Perl6 (either as implementor or
as future developper).  An outsider would say "Tim is publishing about
waporware" and would be (so far) right. Not a good thing for O'Reilly
or Perl.  In this instance, it is clear that Tim has gone out of his
way to help Perl and retrospectively, in my opinion, that was a
mistake.  Little did he know (like everyone) that the Perl6 design
would be such a long process.

These books were too early adverstising for a software that is not
there yet. No doubt Perl6 will be great but what purpose to advertise
it to largely and too loudly beyond the Perl developper communauty if
only to reenforce the bad vaporware perception?

Back to Catalyst. A book about a software which API is rapidly
changing and has not yet a big enough user base is not _yet_ "valuable
information" enough.

(*) http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/ 

Most are excellent except the one with Max Levchin who sounds like a
pretentious brat. And the one with anina, but that may because I can't
care less about cellular phones.

--
  cognominal stef