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?

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Edited to remove reference to merlyn's columns on perl.com.