You didn't do any research, did you?

If you had done a modicum of research, you might have found that an O'Reilly employee submitted a patch to p5p last year changing the core documentation as well as the text that appears when you type perl -v to point to perl.org as the Perl home page, not Perl.com.

You might have noticed that the same employee (and another employee) convinced the rest of the company to donate the text of the glossary of the third edition Camel to the core documentation -- under the same license as the rest of the documentation.

You might have noticed that the company also sponsors, in part, the time of the same two employees to work on Perl 6 for part of every week.

You might have noticed that the company has hosted a CPAN mirror for years, is exceedingly generous into letting useful contributors into the rather expensive conferences for free, contributes often to the Perl Foundation, and publishes as much information as financially possible on Perl.com for free to anyone -- even you.

You might have noticed that "a million books every few months" has, in common with the actual truth, only the word "book".

Now maybe in your ideal world people would do the same amount of work at the same level of quality for free. (Maybe in your world bandwidth is free.) Would I (hey, one of the employees mentioned earlier, strangely enough...) still write and publish about Perl if I weren't an O'Reilly employee? Absolutely.

I wouldn't be able to write or code or publish as often, though.

You certainly don't have to be grateful for the meager scraps a big (ha) bad (ha ha) publishing monopoly (ha ha ha stop, you're hurting me!) throws your way, but given the amount of research and careful thought your post here demonstrates, I'm surprised you didn't spell "Perl" with a Q or something.

PS - publishing celebrity news would be more financially rewarding than technology books. Trust me.

First clue was Perl.com is owned by O'Reilly.

Registrant:
Perl Consulting
   2227 Canyon Blvd, #262
   Boulder, CO 80302
   US

   Domain Name: PERL.COM

   Administrative Contact:
      Christiansen, Tom         tchrist@PERL.COM
      Perl Consulting
      2227 CANYON BLVD APT 262
      BOULDER, CO 80302-5634
      US
      (303) 444-3212 fax: 999 999 9999
[download]

And then there's:

Thirdly, Merlyn is here and he always links to and posts about his articles regarding Perl on the O'Reilly site or newsletter.

I will not challenge the part of "merlyn is here", though. {grin}

1. More than half the books in print about Perl are from publishers other than O'Reily. It's surprising, but a number are from Microsoft Press (or subsidiaries thereof). It just so happens that the good books tend to be printed by O'Reilly. I think that's because the good authors prefer to work with O'Reilly, where possible.
2. Someone has to pay for perl.com. I'm glad a private entity stepped up to do so. If it was in the public domain, would you help pay for it?
3. Tim O'Reilly is a very big opensource advocate and sponsor. Not just of Perl, but of the whole community. As such, he is very well regarded.
4. I have written more articles for perl.com than Randal has. He writes for Linux Magazine.
5. I doubt many people here are friends with merlyn. Many of us respect the hell out of him, but that doesn't mean we worship him.

I just think they are here more for monetary gain than to assist others

Profit is not a dirty word.

• It pays to employ people.
• It pays their mortgages and their medical insurance.
• It delivers taxes that are used to fund governments. Which means hospitals, schools, (and perhaps more relevant in this case) colleges and universities.

If it wasn't for the profits Pair make by selling their services, this site probably wouldn't exist.

Wake up and smell the coffee.

I doubt merlyn would rank me amongst his friends, but he is a seriously knowledgable Perl practitioner, and goes out of his way to ensure that even the articles he writes to earn a living are made available to anyone who care to go looking--for free.

I've had more than a few run-ins with him, and do not agree with everything he says, but that does not prevent me from reading everything he writes and learning something new everytime. He is worthy of anyone's respect if they do anything with Perl--and he has mine. He makes a living from Perl--maybe even a good living--and more power to his elbow for doing so.

Profit is not a dirty word.

Testify!

First off: There is a serious flaw in your logic: "Perl, in a way, is just another way for them to advertise their books and services." ... so what, Perl exists just so you'll buy their books about Perl? I doubt that. Perl exists and will continue to exist regardless of wether O'Reilly writes books about it. The fact tha they write books about it can only help make people more aware of perl -- if they make money in the process good for them.

Second: The fact that someone publishes a lot of books on a topic does not mean that "It's obvious they are trying to be a monopoly for Perl" ... The Girl Scouts make a lot of cookies every year -- that doesn't mean they are trying to have a monopoly on the cookie market, it means that cookie market is a good market, and they think they can be competative, so they sell a product in that market. People like it, so they buy lots so the Girl Scouts make more. O'Reilly publishes as many books as they do, because people buy them. More importanly to your specific thesis: a monoply assumes that the company in question is the only one producing/selling an item in demand. O'Reilly is not hte only company selling perl books, and they are not engaged in any practices that I know of to unfairly limit the ability of other companies to compete with them. if you have specific information that contratdicts that, I suggest you take it to the US Department of Justice.

I don't purchase O'Reilly books anymore because I don't like what they're doing and requested our local library a year or two ago to stop their books all together. They said they'd look into it, but since they don't have much money and the IT department is not a top priority, no such books will be ordered any time soon.

That's just sad. I weep for the people of your community, that your narrow minded viewpoint may in some small way prevent them from having access to usefull books, just because you have a (seemingly irrational) predjudice against the publisher.

As for perl.com...

• http://perl.org/ is the "community home" of Perl.
• Yes, perl.com is owned by O'Reilly. They bought it, they keep paying the registration, and they use it to provide a lot of good free articles about perl, and the price you pay for reading those articles is seeing their adds for perl books. If you don't like it, offer them enough money that they are willing to sell it, and do whatever you want with it -- but frankly if you have that kind of money to support perl with, I'm guessing a lot of people can think of a lot better ways that money could be used.
• If you think it's a travesty that perl.com is owned by a for profit company which promotes the use of Perl, then you have obviously never considered some of the possible alternatives, like http://python.com/

http://python.com/

Note: this site is not safe for work!

thor

The only easy day was yesterday

All good points, but a NWS (or rather GFS) at the end would have been appreciated. :)

-Lee
"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

The Girl Scouts make a lot of cookies every year -- that doesn't mean they are trying to have a monopoly on the cookie market

Oh dear. You took off your tinfoil hat, and the Girl Scouts' mind control satellite now has you brainwashed.

Let this be a lesson to others: NEVER take off the tinfoil hat.

Did it occur to you that maybe O'Reilly just cares more about Perl than other companies do? Anyone could have sponsored perl.com (and paid chromatic to edit it, which he is doing a great job with), and anyone could publish the best Perl books, and anyone could host a great Perl conference, but O'Reilly actually puts their money where their mouth is and does these things. They are currently the most open-source friendly publishing company in existence, and Perl has been greatly helped by their efforts at promoting and marketing it. Feel free to start your own company and do it yourself, but until then, why don't you stop biting the hand that feeds for a minute?

The reality is more like the Perl communtiy is trying to hold onto a monopoly on O'Reilly's attention and money. I hope it lasts a bit longer.

Well if you have been here many many years, you shouldn't feel the need to hide behind anon monk. But that is just me.

A monopoly? I really don't see where you are getting at? Are they defining how Perl will be developed? Or were they smart enough to recognize what was going to happen and court major people to write for them?

Now as to perl.com being public domain? Why? What is gained by it? They are paying to house it and they are paying for the ISP. Are they charging you for access?

Now as to their publishing? Are they preventing others from doing the same? I have other publishers and I have found a couple books to be better then O'Reilly. For example, I don't always recommend "Learning Perl" Some people I know would respond better to other books.

Finally, Merlyn's posts? Again so what? Yes he announces things. Why is that wrong? Are others prevented from doing the same? Why is it an issue? By your logic the Chatterbox should not be allowed as it is not always about Perl. PM's too.

Finally, I have yet to see your point here. You haven't presented a good argument that O'Reilly is hurting Perl.

Don't feed the trolls... it only encourages them!
-- WARNING: You are logged into reality as root.

I look at my Perl bookshelf and I notice one thing. I have very few O'Reilly Perl books. Object Oriented Perl, Extending and Embedding Perl, Higher Order Perl, and Effective Perl all have prominant spots on my bookshelf next to my old, trusty Web Techniques magazines. So, to say that O'Reilly has a monopoly over the Perl hive mind, to me, seems sadly uninformed.

I feel that the Perl community is very likely to have knowledgeble Perl authors who are accessible and part of the community. While they have prominant places in the community, few are set off on a pedistal. I can chat with many of these authors online or through email. I can have a drink with them at various events. I can even debate them on various mailing lists. The Perl community is full of many independent spirits, and many differing opinions, but very few factions common among many other open source communities. That's why, for me at least, its disheartening when people make anonymous, ad hominem attacks for no real reason.

My only bitch that has anything to do with O'Reilly is that Amazon still hasnt sent me the last 12 books I ordered, and im going squirly waiting for them to arrive.

I'm happy that O'Reilly sees supporting Perl as being a profitable business. The relationship is entirely symbiotic not parasitic. Their support doesn't deprive anybody of anything, nor damage the community, so I dont see the problem.

And frankly I'm seriously underimpressed that you recommended your local Library to stop buying their books. I mean did you suggest a good old book burning at the same time?

Frankly this post is so mindboggling stupid ill just say you should wander back to wherever it is that you come from and leave us alone.

Wassercrats, is that you? I remember when you posted Boycott O'Reilly.

Welcome back Wassercrats. I've missed you.

I'll admit up-front that I don't have any strong feelings either way for O'Reilly ;)

I rarely look at perl.com anymore since they stopped funding the perl6 summaries, and they rarely have new articles. I also haven't bought an O'Reilly book in a while, partly because recent releases haven't been too relevant for me, but also because now I have a good grounding in perl, I can find out a lot of the things I don't know via the internet.

I would still recommend O'Reilly's Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl to anyone new to perl.

Even though I'm not a lover of O'Reilly, I have to reply, because I find that not a single point in your post makes sense. (strange, given that most programmers are quite good at logic ;)

First clue was Perl.com is owned by O'Reilly. The domain should be public domain

Why? The perl 'homepage' is perl.org, not perl.com. (I am also pleased that recent versions of perl now state the perl homepage to be perl.org, rather than perl.com, when you run `perl v`.)

they release a million books on the topic every few months it appears and trying to be the only books available for this specific language.

I happened to be looking at perl books on amazon last night, so I knew this was wrong.
According to amazon.co.uk, there were 6 O'Reilly books in the past year and 8 non-O'Reilly.
In the next 3 months, there will be 2 O'Reilly books out, and 4 non-O'Reilly.

but when is it that information is no longer information but more of a sales letter?

I just think they are here more for monetary gain than to assist others.

They're a company, of course they exist for monetary gain.
But note that they're not 'here', in the sense that they don't control perlmonks, they don't control perl, and you can program in perl without having anything to do with O'Reilly.

Thirdly, Merlyn is here and he always links to and posts about his articles regarding Perl on the O'Reilly site or newsletter.

Best regards from the German Perl Workshop (where O'Reilly is one main sponsor, and IIRC has also been for at least the last six years) -> http://www.perl-workshop.de/

1. O'Reilly doesn't own Perl
2. It publishes great books
3. It does great things for Perl
4. Profit is okay in the U.S. dude read Atlas Shrugged already
5. If you are a real man or whatever you read perldocs more than O'Reilly anyway
6. When I drop by once every few months by chance they usually have an interesting article
7. You worked against what libraries are there for
8. I usually don't buy many books but one of theirs on SOAP in Perl is really fabulous so far.. my one programming book this past year and I saved up over $50 to buy it overseas, it is worth it even so.
9. Nice flame thread how nostalgic, now go apologize to your library.
10. You are mentally ill and you have no obligation to pay O'Reilly anything.
11. Please illustrate your point by indicating the high quality texts you have published worldwide for free
12. There is no evil conspiracy at O'Reilly or Perlmonks
13. We need more great publishers like O'Reilly, not less, to increase the number of high quality Perl related texts on the shelves of bookstores which tend to be about other languages. This is a commercial endeavor and O'Reilly is doing a good job vis a vis the community as far as I know.

I upvoted you before you added the bit about counselling/meds and now wish I hadn't. Can we leave out that kind of stuff, please?

Your wish is my command. Sorry, you are quite right.

Perl, in a way, is just another way for them to advertise their books and services.

OK... so they support Perl because it's profitable for them to do so. I don't see a problem with that, as it causes no problems with the way Perl is written, released, distributed or supported. Their support is helpful to the Perl community, and I'm glad that they are able to profit from that. Win-win propositions are good things.

First clue was Perl.com is owned by O'Reilly. The domain should be public domain as Perl is open source. Instead it's owned by a specific company trying to reap money off of it.

First, you have a factual error. Perl.com is not owned by O'Reilly, but by Tom Christiansen. TC is an O'Reilly author, but is not their employee -- they just publish his books. O'Reilly has chosen to sponsor perl.com to make it as useful as possible. In exchange, they ask for publicity. Seems like another win-win to me. If O'Reilly stopped sponsoring perl.com, I would hope that Tom would either get another sponsorship, or that the community would step up and keep the site running. At that point, of course, all the O'Reilly marketing materials would probably disappear.

Secondly, they release a million books on the topic every few months it appears and trying to be the only books available for this specific language. It's obvious they are trying to be a monopoly for Perl and it's really heartbreaking.

That's ridiculous: you said yourself that Perl is open-source software. It's impossible for O'Reilly to monopolize Perl -- they don't and can't own it. Lots of other people publish Perl books, too, and there is nothing O'Reilly could do to stop that.

The fact that O'Reilly's books appear to be the only ones sometimes only says two things. First, that they were first to fill a niche that no one else was publishing for. Second, that their product's quality is such that they have very little competition. Even if they could monopolize (which they haven't) the Perl book business, they have no way of turning that into control of Perl.

So the community gets many good Perl books, and O'Reilly gets to make some money. Plus, major Perl community members (like Tom Christiansen, for example) get to make some money from their knowledge of Perl, which provides motivation for them to continue to be active in the community. Hm, win-win again...

I don't purchase O'Reilly books anymore because I don't like what they're doing and requested our local library a year or two ago to stop their books all together. They said they'd look into it, but since they don't have much money and the IT department is not a top priority, no such books will be ordered any time soon.

Your decisions are yours to make, of course, and if you feel O'Reilly isn't helping in the way you want, you're free to vote with your wallet. But to ask your library not to provide some of the best books on the market because you have a gripe with O'Reilly's motivation is just stupid. Firstly, by denying access to excellent material, you'd only hurt the community's ability to grow and learn. Secondly, if you're after O'Reilly, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot -- they are the most-recommended Perl books around, and so if the Library doesn't have them, more people will just buy a copy.

I'm not saying the information they give is bad and they don't help the Perl community. I just think they are here more for monetary gain than to assist others.

Why is thier motivation even relevant? As long as they are not out to hurt Perl (which you acknowledge they aren't), then who cares why they help?

O'Reilly is actually fairly enlightened as a company: they realize that Perl can help them make money, and that a strong Perl community means more potential customers. So, they support the community. Since that helps us, and does no harm to us, why should we care if they make some money in the process?

I'm not sure I follow. You say O'Reilly is using Perl to sell their books? And that by publishing books on Perl, they're trying to create a monopoly??

I believe this is incorrect. First, O'Reilly publishes on a huge number of topics - programming languages, the "hacks" series (including a hack book about *baseball*, for crying out loud), .Net, Microsoft applications and OSes, Linux, Unix, Web development, digital photography, SQL, network security, spam, and much more. Books on Perl are a significant minority of the titles, but a minority nonetheless.

There are any number of books on Perl by other publishers. I've bought many of them, and most of them are only marginally useful, if at all. O'Reilly's books pack more information into them, and they are often very thorough. Many of the books have close to 1,000 pages, and cost less than similar books from other publishers. O'Reilly is doing nothing more sinister than providing good quality for the money, something I wish more businesses would do.

As for [id://merlyn]'s posting links to his articles - could you provide us with a couple? I must have missed them.

O'Reilly certainly is in business for monetary gain. You are quite correct. Whether they are in it "more" for money than to help people is a matter known only to them. I cannot read a person's heart, and it is irrelevant. They provide a great service and do so in a pleasant way. They are responsive to their customers, something I don't find in many large corporations. Whether they are evil minions of the Dark Side, or angels from heaven, they nevertheless do good things.

I don't even know [id://merlyn] from the Chatterbox; I only know him through his Perlmonks posts and his excellent book (published by O'Reilly, I know). I like what he says because he knows what he's talking about, not because we're buddies.

I think your concerns for the Perl community are misplaced. Perl is doing quite well. O'Reilly is doing far more good than harm, both to Perl in particular, and to IT in general. There is no Perl monopoly, and there is no Lumber Cartel.

Domain names, as others have pointed out, cost money to register. Web hosting also costs money. Last time I registered a domain (many years ago), I paid a few hundred dollars for the priviledge of having it online with a given name. Secondly, they release a million books on the topic every few months it appears and trying to be the only books available for this specific language. It's obvious they are trying to be a monopoly for Perl and it's really heartbreaking.

You can always do what I did years ago; as a poor student, I couldn't afford a $50 book, so I read the free man pages that came with Perl instead. Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know (and have been able to tell upon skimming the core Perl books), the information in the man pages about the language itself is essentially the same, if presented in a more concise form.

Thirdly, Merlyn is here and he always links to and posts about his articles regarding Perl on the O'Reilly site or newsletter. I realize this is a Perl community for such information, but when is it that information is no longer information but more of a sales letter?

Who cares? Just because someone advertises something doesn't force you to buy it. Excercise your freedom NOT to buy into things you don't like. If you don't like O'Reily books, don't buy them. I don't buy them. I think they're reasonably good books; well written and accurate; I just don't like learning languages from "How to Learn This Language" type books. I personally prefer a detailed specification of the language features, and documentation on available library calls, with quick lookup of specific language details, all of which the Perl documentation pages provide.

If you really want to boycott O'Reilly, go ahead. I don't see the need. I don't think O'Reilly s a monopoly; I think it's a company that's been successful by virtue of producing books that people actually like. I don't like learning through reading books, but all through university, and on into the workforce, people who like reading tech books tell me they respect the work that O'Reily does.

And for the record, I don't know Randal Schwarz, so I'm not biased for or against him. I know he wrote Learning Perl, uses the pompous nickname "Merlyn", and got into a big legal fight with Intel; like just about everyone else in the world knows.

He's just zis guy, you know? :-)

--
Ytrew

O'Reilly is a publishing company; like all companies it exists to make money for its owners. They happen to make a significant amount of money selling books about computer related topics, some of which are based on open-source projects, including Perl. So do a number of other companies; the fact that except for a few university presses, publishing companies are profit-making ventures, so refusing to deal with them because they make money on open-source or "free" software is rather, to be delicate, inane. Indeed, punishing O'Reilly for having the perl.com web site (as, for example, by organizing boycotts against their books) is not unlikely to reduce net support for open source, which is already berated as being anti-business.

Since Larry Wall is (according to his bio in Programming Perl) an associate of O'Reilly, he makes money from books sold by O'Reilly, is he party to this conspiracy?

Presumably, O'Reilly pays merlyn for his columns on perl.com. They may even pay him based on how many readers his columns attract. O'Reilly, and all the other publishers selling books (except the vanity presses) pay merlyn and brian d foy, Damian Conway, Simon Cozens, and all their other authors for writing the books they sell. Are these authors to forego significant earnings because publishers exist to make money?

Since Larry Wall is (according to his bio in Programming Perl) an associate of O'Reilly, he makes money from books sold by O'Reilly, is he party to this conspiracy?

Actually Larry no longer works (directly) for O'Reilly, see this article for more details. Now he might still get royalties from O'Reilly for the books he wrote, but as Dominus recently said thats not nearly as much $$ as you might think.

-stvn

In my very small (2 people) sample of non-fiction writers, 50% hold down conventional full time jobs. The other one has started to write fiction because the money is much better.

emc

" When in doubt, use brute force." — Ken Thompson